Podcast appearances and mentions of Martin Amis

Diving into the working ways of some of the world's greatest artists. -----SourcesDaily Rituals - Mason Currey-----Time Stamps:3:49 - Benjamin Franklin: The two questions and the "air bath."6:05 - Scott F. Fitzgerald: Work like a lion9:04 - Paul Erdos: Drugs and stimulants12:20 - William Gass: Work angry14:07 - Anne Rice: Flexibility, ease, and uninterrupted time16:42 - David Lynch: Find a thinking place17:40 - Umberto Eco: Thinking in the cracks 19:05 - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Is it sustainable?20:50 - Twyla Tharp: Building a bridge22:20 - Graham Greece: Burn your youth, sustain as you age23:50 - Marcel Proust and Philip Roth: Go monk mode26:25 - Carl Jung: Make it boring28:15 - Thomas Mann: Setting Boundaries30:05 - Gustav Mahler, Twyla Tharp: Preparing to  be creative32:47 - Nicholson Baker, Thomas Wolfe, Fredreich Schiller, Woody Allen - Get creative, find your way37:20 - Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky: Do the unpleasant first40:25 - Bernard Malamud: The only thing that matters42:03 - Anthony Trollope - Advice on starting a craft44:52 - Gustave Flaubert: the ups and downs of the creative process46:38 - Ernest Hemingway: Keep some juice in the tank47:30 - James Boswell: The morning reminder49:55 - Gertrude Stein, Martin Amis, Joyce Carol Oates - Genius in endurance in disguise 52:22 - Ideas on making time, finding effortless work, and inspiration54:20 - Karl Marx: The right regrets56:00 - William James: The Solomon Paradox58:26 - Rene Descartes - Don't compromise your working way-----Check out my books below:Daily Greatness: Short Stories and Essays on the Act of Becoming Chasing Greatness 2nd Edition - Timeless Stories on the Pursuit of ExcellenceStay connected and check out more on our website:

Alex Trippier is a writer, speaker, podcast host, husband and father. He is an emerging voice on parenting and the role of men in family life. Alex has immersed himself in the work of leading mothers and parenting experts, exploring women's lived experiences, mental load and family life.Alex brings a compassionate, feminist perspective to a growing international audience and writes regularly for 'The i' as well as having been cited in Grazia and Marie Claire.I connected with Alex on Instagram and I LOVED this conversation — and the laughs! He is brilliant and admirably honest about himself and his journey.In this episode we speak about:Alex's reels and his activism in the parenting spacethe problem with assumptionswhy so many couples can suffer after having childrendoing the work on ourselves, midlife 'crises' and individuationwhat doing burlesque did for me (on a deeper level than people may think)enjoying life as a couple more and Eve Rodsky's book 'Unicorn Space'gender norms and how men and women are judged in societyAlex's (great) observations of matrescence and why self-advocacy mattersresponsibilities and the words we usenavigating social media, self-worth and egothe medicine that tears can holdThemes: patriarchy, matrescence, patrescence, parenting, self-advocacy, domestic abuseWe mention Charlotte Warne Thomas, Lucy Jones, Martin Amis, Richard Reeves, Eve Rodsky, Carl Jung, Terry Real, Leah Ruppanner and Steve BiddulphTo learn more about Alex see here on Instagram, click here for his writing for 'The i Paper' and Alex's podcast is called 'Be A Happier Parent', available on all platforms.At the end, I read a poem written by me.Did you enjoy this episode? If so, I would really appreciate it if you could please leave a review on the platform that you listen.For more insights and to contact me you can find me on Instagram, and/or on my website: www.lucywyldecoaching.com.

Een relatie met een narcist kan best werken. Alles valt uit mijn handenZoals mijn cameraDeze vraag stelt nooit iemand in een relatieMensen veroordelen best snel andere koppelsAlsof zij zo perfect zijn in de liefdeNiet dusEen kopie van je vorige liefje aan de haak slaanEen relatie met een narcist kan best werkenZijn ze een beetje aardig voor elkaar?Hou je van de versie van jezelf die je bent bij de ander?Martin Amis (1949–2023)VreemdgaanJe kinderen nooit meer zien Support the show1)  Ontvang elke woensdagavond een mail van me over gevoelens waar niemand over praat. 2) Mijn shop vol boeken boeken, posters en tasjes3) Steun me via petjeaf.com/tomsondarko en luister exclusieve afleveringen.

My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen's Virtuous Liberalism'. It's a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation.Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means.In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen's ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers.TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she's not making arguments, she's not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.And I think it's part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who's a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers' Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”OLIVER: And it's a long list.TRALDI: And I think it's a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it's not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century.TRALDI: But yes, I think it's obvious—without knowing the background, I'm sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they're both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there's this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—OLIVER: It's a great time.TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.OLIVER: You've also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It's a very, very fertile—explorations.TRALDI: Yes, yes. There's all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?TRALDI: “A lot” might be—This was my favourite bit.TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it's one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can't really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”OLIVER: There's a discussion in one of Hayek's papers, which is—it's a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it's not so much that I'm trying to get information about the thing you're trying to sell me, but I'm really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there's a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they're all working on that problem together.TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it's often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else's character?OLIVER: Exactly.TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?OLIVER: And if you're too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it's really, really hard.TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else's character?Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here. Here he is on Twitter. His Substack is orting. You can watch the episode on YouTube here.TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he's written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online.He's got a Substack. He's maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome.OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me.Reading Austen as a PhilosopherOLIVER: Let's just start—before we get to this article you've written, tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she's often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever.TRALDI: Right.OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think?TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that's been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles.And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you're going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity.You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people's virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character's convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations?So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who's interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever.OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation for this issue that you might call moral disarming or unilateral disarming. You know, does the moral person put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the immoral person? And then how do we actually help—how does morality survive?So that's a kind of philosophical question, but I tend to think—I taught last year—I think we've talked about this a bit. I taught in a great books program at Tulsa.OLIVER: This is the Jennifer Frey program.TRALDI: This is the ill-fated Jennifer Frey program. Jennifer—I don't know if you've met her, but she's an incredibly charismatic person. But somehow the program, despite being enormously successful, did not survive. You know, I was there for a year, and they decided that was long enough.OLIVER: [laughs] You don't think your arrival was the—TRALDI: No, no. I hope not. I most certainly hope not.OLIVER: No. General problems of higher education prevailed. Yes.TRALDI: Yes, many, many problems of higher education these days. But yes, so I think—what was I saying?OLIVER: Well, I think we're getting to this question of, you are not just a philosopher; you teach the great books.TRALDI: Right, exactly. The great books. That's where I was. Yes.Philosophy and the Great BooksOLIVER: So, one thing I'm interested in is that, you know, reading as a philosopher, you get a slightly different perspective on Austen. When you read other fiction, poetry, whatever, is there a benefit to you as a philosopher? Does it broaden you in some way?TRALDI: Yes. I think absolutely, it's broadening, but it's also focusing in a different way. You know, contemporary philosophy is often described or captured with the word epicycles. So what we mean when we say epicycles is, you have some major theory, which is supposed to answer some big question. And then your career as a philosopher—you're like three layers deep in the theory, in some sub-debate, and you're making some really fine-grained distinctions.And if you can make those distinctions successfully, you've had a really great career. But I think it's easy to forget, why are we doing—you know, what attracted us to philosophy? Why are we doing this to begin with?And the great novels, great books in general—one example I always use is the Book of Job. It doesn't really—it's not doing clear philosophy on the question of why do bad things happen to good people. But when you read it, you feel the question, why do bad things happen to good people? You get it, you know? You get why this is a question that people have worried about for thousands of years. You get why it calls out for an answer.You know, there's a lot of truth out there. I'm looking at a set of coat hangers, and I could count the coat hangers. But if you were given the decision, would I rather have an answer to how many coat hangers are across the room from me, or why do bad things happen to good people? You'd probably go with the latter one. There's somehow some kind of depth or importance to that question, right?And I think there's—a great novelist can often generate some vividity to these questions. They can show how these questions are part of a good life, asking these questions, trying to have these questions answered—or a not-so-good life.Certainly in Austen there are a lot of characters who learn to be more virtuous. Probably Emma is the clearest example. But you might also think of Marianne Dashwood. Really—OLIVER: Lizzy Bennet.TRALDI: Lizzy Bennet really learns to be a better person. I actually think her character is rather close to Emma in a lot of ways.OLIVER: Yes, I think Emma's sort of a clear rewrite of Lizzy in some—yes, yes.TRALDI: Yes, and in some ways more evocative, actually. Yes. I mean, we can talk about all these books. But yes, I think there's these things, even—obviously qua literature, they have other virtues, right? Which much philosophy doesn't have; very little philosophy has the literary virtues.But the philosophical virtue that a lot of literature does have is you see, okay, these are the—this is what a life is like. This is what making choices is like. These are the big questions when you decide how to live your life and what kinds of choices to make.And I think Austen—these questions are all through Austen, even though nobody has to murder anybody in Austen. Nobody has to make decisions about war and peace or about, you know, civilizational decline or civilizational progress or anything like that. These people making these small choices in a lot of ways. But those are the lives that most of us lead. And when you read Austen, you think, “Oh, okay, there's a virtuous and a vicious way to lead this kind of rather normal life.”The Good LifeOLIVER: The question of what is a good life, or what is a good life in a commercial society, maybe, is the sort of bedrock of what she's doing.TRALDI: Yes, I think so. And that's why I think Austen—you know, Austen wasn't on our syllabus at Tulsa, but she was certainly discussed. And the “what is a good life” question—to me, it's the big question that a great books program for college students should always come back to.If I didn't know what else to talk about, I would just say, “Well, we just read this book.” You know, we read these old biographies of Charlemagne from, like, Einhard—Notker the Stammerer and Einhard, his adopted son or whatever. I don't remember. But this is like 800s. I'm sure you know more about this stuff than I do.And I wasn't quite sure what to do with them because what do I know about Charlemagne? So I just said, “Does it seem like Charlemagne lived a good life?” And you know, you're off to the races. And I think that's important at that age, because that's the age at which—OLIVER: For the undergraduates?TRALDI: Yes. I think that's the age at which you're starting to make your own big decisions about what sort of life to lead. And I think for me, looking back to myself at that age, I think one thing I did wrong—at Tulsa I was in some ways as much a student as a teacher. I was rereading a lot of this stuff for the first time in decades. And some of it I was reading for the first time. As I told you, I was reading a lot of Austen for the first time for this essay.OLIVER: Right, right.TRALDI: And yes, it was stuff that I had thought about at a theoretical level, you know, like what are the ins and outs of this theory or this philosophical move or something like that. But you feel the question a bit differently when you're like, “Okay, I'm an adult. I have to decide whether to live in this way or that way.”The world is open to you. You could convert to Thomism [laughter] like so many have tried to have me do, or you could become a merchant after reading The Wealth of Nations. Or you could become a revolutionary after reading Marx, or you could become a Nietzschean. You know, there are all these choices open to you.OLIVER: Please don't become a Nietzchean.TRALDI: No, no. That is, I'm a—OLIVER: Keep your children out of school if that's going to be the result. [laughs]TRALDI: Yes. I'm a committed moralist, so I cannot, but he is—he made a comeback, that's for sure.Philosophy and PoetryOLIVER: Now, there's this obviously sort of long-running question in philosophy about, what is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? Are they antagonists, or are they in some way, you know, twins, and each provides one half of what is needed for a complete way of understanding the world? Do you have a position on this?TRALDI: Yes, I mean, I think they're what the kids call twinning.OLIVER: Twinning? [laughs]TRALDI: I think they're twinning. No, no, I think that means something different. I think that means when you're wearing the same outfit or something like that.OLIVER: So we're almost twinning with our stripes—yes, I see.TRALDI: We're almost. We actually—we are stripes and blue. Yes, we're closer than I would've expected.I would say closer to twins. There are a lot of claims that philosophy is at odds somehow with this or that. There's also this—certain people will say, “Well, ever since Socrates, philosophy has been at odds with politics.” And a big part of philosophy is, how do you survive? Well, I don't know. Nobody's trying to kill me. I think of myself as a decently committed philosopher.OLIVER: It seems to me this changed fundamentally in the Enlightenment and with the Romantics, and they see it all much more joined up. It's a sort of ancient-and-modern dynamic.TRALDI: Yes, there may be an ancient-and-modern distinction there. But yes, for me I don't see any kind of contradiction. Now, there are—and I think this comes out of what I said before—philosophical attempts to understand poetry. And certain kinds of literary and aesthetic devices do sometimes fall a little flat.The philosophical literature on metaphor, for instance—I think some theories of metaphor really don't get why people use metaphors. [laughter] So one of the most important theories of metaphor is that they're all just false, that it's like everybody who uses a metaphor is lying. This isn't the full theory. There are bells and whistles added.OLIVER: Sure, sure.TRALDI: But yes, so I think there's no contradiction. But at the same time, they are different modes in some ways, and people who do the one are often trying to do something different than the other.I do think that the desire for rigor and precision and clarity that philosophers have can be a little maddening to nonphilosophers, who see the pull of philosophical questions like, “What sort of life I should lead?” and then see, what do philosophers actually do?And we're doing all this modal logic and all these truth tables and all this very technical stuff that looks like math. And they say, “That can't possibly be the right way to think about how to live.” And it's true that there are these studies of—that suggest ethicists aren't actually very good people and things like that, although you have to wonder what is the background ethical theory that went into evaluating them.So yes, I don't think there's really a contradiction between philosophy and anything else. But certainly, there was a point in my life where I always come back to trying to write poetry and do poorly and then stop. But it was always something where I would say, “Okay, if I'm doing philosophy in the afternoon, I better wait till the evening to write poetry.” You have to sort of reboot and get into a different mode.OLIVER: Iris Murdoch used to write philosophy in the morning and novels in the afternoon. That kind of thing.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's very sensible.OLIVER: And she was upstairs for the one and downstairs for the other.TRALDI: Yes. That's even better, you know?Favorite PoetsOLIVER: Which poets do you like?TRALDI: Geez, I guess for an American, I like Wallace Stevens. I wasn't expecting this question. For a Brit, you know, I actually like Philip Larkin a lot.OLIVER: Oh, yes?TRALDI: I know—what is the opinion of Larkin? Is he considered—OLIVER: Very high.TRALDI: Very high? Okay.OLIVER: Some—there are some dissenters, but basically he's the guy.TRALDI: He's the guy, okay. Yes.OLIVER: Twentieth-century English poetry is like Auden, Larkin, Betjeman.TRALDI: Yes, Auden is—actually, my friend Jane Cooper just wrote something about Auden.OLIVER: Yes, Jane is excellent.TRALDI: Yes, Jane is really great.OLIVER: That was in the New Statesman if you want to look it up.TRALDI: That was in the New Statesman. Yes, yes, yes. But Auden, I don't know quite as well.I mean, poetry is—I think it's interesting the way that we receive poetry now. I think you were talking about this a few days ago, about things like poems appearing as inspirational quotes on social media or something like that, and whoever is the most quotable. And you felt like maybe Dostoevsky is very quotable.OLIVER: Dostoevsky has a sort of screenshot quality.TRALDI: Yes, yes.OLIVER: As does Martin Amis.TRALDI: Yes. So I—OLIVER: Whereas Philip Larkin in a funny way—you know, he has very short poems. You can get the whole poem on Twitter. Like, Robert Frost has that. But something like “The Whitsun Weddings,” it's quite hard to just take three lines out. The whole thing works as a—and that, so that poem gets less—TRALDI: Yes. Which is what you would expect from a good poem, really, that it would form a kind of whole.OLIVER: Exactly. If it's a three-page ode, it should have a continuous quality.TRALDI: Yes, it should have a kind of internal structure. Yes.OLIVER: There are some one-line things and—but I think it's notable that a poet like Wordsworth doesn't seem to get a lot of social media play. And I think probably that's one reason.TRALDI: So yes, I think Larkin is somebody who, I did see some shorter references to him, and I thought I'd better just go and look up a ton of poems by this guy. And Stevens was the same way.Death and Philip LarkinOLIVER: So, which Larkin do you like?TRALDI: You're really putting me on the spot here. [laughter] It has been a little while.OLIVER: I lied to you and said it would be about Jane Austen.TRALDI: Yes, now I'm completely screwed. Well, he has a bunch about death. He has one where death is a ship following you. And he has one where death is, like, a fruit that gets picked or something.OLIVER: Apple?TRALDI: Might be an apple.OLIVER: He decides not to throw the apple.TRALDI: There's one with sweetbreads in it. And now I'm really—OLIVER: The ship one, “Next, Please”—that's excellent.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: He sees the—it's like hearing the music coming, and then the ship.TRALDI: I forgot that that was the title. I forgot that that was the title.OLIVER: And then as the ship goes past, it leaves nothing in its wake. It's very sort of—very gloomy.TRALDI: It's very gloomy, yes. I think I read Larkin in a gloomy phase; it was like Larkin and Radiohead or something.OLIVER: But he's a good example of what you were saying before, that he won't think propositionally. He's logical in the sense that he's sort of orderly, and he goes from one thing to the next. But he's not being a philosopher.TRALDI: No, of course. Yes.OLIVER: But he's very preoccupied with the sorts of questions that philosophers are probing, but has a sort of very meaningful treatment of them.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: And I think in a way, the sharp response that you want from the reader in those questions, Larkin is better at provoking than someone like Bertrand Russell or some other contemporary of his.TRALDI: Yes, yes.OLIVER: Bertrand Russell's a bit earlier, but you know what I mean.TRALDI: No, I think that's exactly right. And I think that is why I'm a fan of the great books pedagogically and not—I don't know if Larkin will be called a great, you know, like, who knows? I don't really understand that designation, but tings like poetry and novels.OLIVER: The biggest dissenter was Harold Bloom, who said Philip Larkin's just a period piece. And he doesn't understand why everyone likes him.TRALDI: Oh, yes, well, I'm not on board with everything. Oh, I've also been—OLIVER: No, you're not very Bloomian.TRALDI: I'm not very Bloomian, I don't think.OLIVER: Either Allan or Harold.TRALDI: Yes. Well, I actually—this is very embarrassing, but I've actually never read The Closing of the American Mind, which I know is—OLIVER: But why should you? I'm not sure it's retained its—TRALDI: Well, it's certainly been received into my circle. But it is like a classic of anti-ideological—OLIVER: Sure. Have you read Adler, How to Read a Book, that kind of great books stuff?TRALDI: No. There's so many things that I haven't read. I mean, I'm just learning how to read. I learned how to read in Tulsa last year, [laughter] in Oklahoma, which is not where most people would go to learn how to read.Jane Austen and the Problem of MoralityOLIVER: So let's move to Jane Austen. Your thesis basically is, many moral theories face this problem that if I believe XYZ theory and you don't believe it, you can get the advantage of me. Because I'll always stick to my principles and you can just be a bad guy.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: So is morality screwed? This is what people say about liberalism. This is what you're arguing. And you think Jane Austen's got an answer to that?TRALDI: Yes, I think she has a kind of answer. And again, one decision I had to make while writing the essay was, am I going to go super—this is a completely philosophically rigorous and respectable answer? Or am I just going to kind of sketch it?OLIVER: Slum it in literary criticism? [laughter]TRALDI: Yes, I wouldn't put it quite that way, but—and I think I went for the latter, where I just wanted to kind of evoke the answer. And I think the answer has something to do with living in a large enough society where—and Austen I think is not the only person to give this answer. But you live in a large enough society where, when people see you acting well and somebody else acting poorly, the disadvantage that you have in that one interaction is outweighed by the advantages you have from the society that you gain from being seen to act well by many others.So one thing I didn't mention here, but a connection I made when I was first coming up with this idea, is that it's actually a lot like what Martin Luther King Jr. says about civil disobedience. So he says, you might think, if you're out there and the police are coming at you with bats, or the white supremacists are coming at you with bats or whatever, weapons or whatever, you might think, “I'm on the losing end of this interaction.”But actually what will happen is that this interaction will be seen by many others. And you, by keeping your calm, will be seen to be the virtuous one, and they, by being violent, will be seen to be the vicious ones. And this can only help your political cause. I'm probably abstracting some of the details of King's presentation.OLIVER: In a vulgar sense, this is the sort of “be the change you want to see” approach.TRALDI: Yes, but also, be the change you want other people to see. You know? Because that's how it gets saved from—and again, one of the ways in which this is not quite philosophically rigorous is because the philosopher can say, “Well, what about an example where nobody's going to see it? Or what about an example where the situation is set up that in doing the right thing, you're perceived to have done the wrong thing?” And you get back into tough problems. And that's why we have philosophy. You know, there's always going to be these puzzles.OLIVER: But we don't get the—I think this is what the novelists are helpful for. We don't get to set the conditions in our lives. You know, when you're doing a philosophical problem, you can just say, “Well, these are the conditions. What happens then?” And what Jane Austen is so good at is saying, “I'm going to take her and drop her in this house, and that's life. And she's just going to—she won't even know what the conditions are for a long time.” That's the novelist's preoccupation.TRALDI: Yes. Yes. It's interesting what you said about not even knowing what the conditions are. It's one thing I love, which is there in, I think, a lot of Austen—and it's done by a lot of my favorite novelists. I think Kazuo Ishiguro is really good at this. It's just novels where you see the characters' growing awareness of their circumstances and—OLIVER: Like in Klara and the Sun or something.TRALDI: Yes, or I think certainly in Never Let Me Go and in Remains of the Day, a lot of the action is in a situation where you understand what's going on better than the characters do.Clues and GamesTRALDI: And I think we talked about this the other day. In Austen, Emma, for example, is this sort of, like, halfway detective where she sees a lot of clues that could help her understand the nature of the life she's leading and the circumstances she's in, but she always misinterprets the clues. But on the other hand, it's not like she misses them entirely. She's kind of on the right track, and at least she's trying.OLIVER: And what I think Austen does so well in that book—I think it's her most important book—is that by putting us, without quite realizing it, with Emma's blinkers on, as it were, and only allowing our perspective to be her perspective, she makes us the detective.But whereas in a detective novel, you know, there's a funny little man and he is a detective, and he says, “Oh, there's a clue in this novel,” the read of—on the first read very often goes straight past what they must later realize to be a clue. And that is such a normal condition of life, that, “Oh, actually, that was one of the conditions, but you couldn't have known it. Sorry.” And you can only work it out in retrospect.TRALDI: Yes. In modern love, these are sometimes called red flags. [laughter] I think it's not quite a precise analogy, but yes, I think it's right. And I certainly—I had read Emma years ago and didn't really notice. As you say, on my first read, I didn't really notice, even having watched—I think it was the, what is it, the Kate Beckinsale version maybe, from ITV in like 1996 or something.It was really in reading it for this essay that I noticed that this feature that, starting on page 30 or 40 or so, there's a—and they're often in games. The clues are often in games. So very early on, Elton is playing some sort of poem game with Emma.OLIVER: The riddles, yes.TRALDI: The riddle game. And you know, Emma already misinterprets his riddles as being about Harriet rather than about her. But then there's also—the riddles also have some relation to things that happen much later.OLIVER: Then there's the anagram game at the end.TRALDI: There's the anagram game at the end. Yes, it's the—and I don't think there are many games like that in any of the other Austen.OLIVER: People play games, but we're not taken into them and have them narrated in that way.TRALDI: And they're not word games in general. There's card games and things like that. And you know, in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham has all these gambling debts and things like that.OLIVER: Yes.TRALDI: You know, in—I don't know if you know Whit Stillman, but for the same magazine a couple years ago I wrote about Whit Stillman, who's a sort of conservative filmmaker who's a huge Austen fan and brings in Austenian themes to a lot of his movies, but writes them about characters in the 1960s and '70s. And one of them was called The Last Days of Disco, for example, about—and some of the broader social themes he talks about are also there in Austen.So one thing that was just on the edges of my consciousness as I read through the novels for this essay was the question of the noble man versus the working man, which I think is very present in Austen and has something to do with her conception of virtue: that the virtuous person will be engaging in commerce in some way.OLIVER: Those moments of the noble and the virtuous man or whatever often take place in a shop, like the drapier in Emma or the jewelry shop in Sense and Sensibility.TRALDI: That's interesting. That's interesting.OLIVER: She's very careful to take us into a commercial situation and contrast.TRALDI: See, that is the sort of detail that I think a philosopher—I think we—the mere—the vibe of, “You're in a shop, and this means something.” I think this is something philosophers are—we can watch for the action; we can judge the characters' actions. But then there are these questions of atmosphere and milieu. And certain things happen in a shop; certain things happen at the seaside. In Persuasion there's an injury by the seaside.OLIVER: Yes. That's one of the most exciting scenes in Austen. Very dramatic.TRALDI: Yes, yes. I think actually Persuasion in some ways is quite different than her other books. It has a sort of—you know, in some ways it feels a little more like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights at points. There's a little bit of a windblown, dark quality to it at times. It's a little bit bleaker. It's a little hard to explain why, but that's just a feeling that I had reading it that maybe had changed with some of the other literary tastes of the time.Artlessness in Austen's HeroinesOLIVER: Now, the quality that you focus on in the heroines, in this question of virtue defending itself against bad actors who break the rules, is artlessness.TRALDI: Yes. So this is a term Austen uses quite a bit, and almost always, she very much picks and chooses the characters who are going to receive this term. And I thought that this is like—it's not only her artless characters who face this question about how can morality survive, or how can virtue prevail, but I think they're the limit point.Like, if you really are unwilling to use—and I mentioned in the essay, when Darcy describes—I forget what; maybe it's him describing how he found Lydia and Wickham, or it's something to do with Wickham—he said, “I had to resort to arts.” So it must be, the “arts” back then means—one of the meanings of the term is dishonesty or subterfuge or something.OLIVER: Yes, if someone was artful, it could have—TRALDI: Yes, like the Artful Dodger.OLIVER: Exactly. Could have negative connotations for sure.TRALDI: Yes. And so the artless one, you know, they're missing something.So it's the question of, if you view—morality in a way means you're missing something, right? You've taken arts out of your arsenal. You've taken tools that could deal with certain situations, and you've just decided not to use them. So the question is, how can it be an advantage to have less tools?You know, we're here at Mercatus; the economists would tell you it's never advantageous to have fewer choices, right? There's no paradox of choice. It's never advantageous to have fewer choices. And so I think this is the—if morality is a kind of unilateral disarmament, artlessness is the clearest case of that.OLIVER: And you're seeing that in Fanny Price, Elinor—TRALDI: You see that in Fanny Price. You see that in Elinor. Harriet Smith is described as artless over and over again. And then there are these other characters who are described as artful, or other things that are mentioned as arts.I think Harriet, in a lot of ways, is the one who's most often described this way. And it's interesting because you think of Emma changing a lot in Emma, but Knightley actually shifts in his evaluation of Harriet, who he thought of as sort of an unserious person. And Knightley himself comes to recognize her artlessness as a kind of seriousness which makes her a good match, not ultimately for him, but for his dude, Robert.OLIVER: The farmer.TRALDI: The farmer, yes.OLIVER: He doesn't change his view of her social position, though.TRALDI: No, certainly not. But he does change his view of her character, basically. You know, her artlessness is not silliness. It has a sort of depth to it.And yes, certainly Fanny. In the Whit Stillman movie Metropolitan that's part of what set me on this, there's this whole discussion of the book Mansfield Park and this old Lionel Trilling essay about it where he says, how is it—there's this question about how modern people can even like Mansfield Park because we've sort of lost the notion of virtue being exciting or something.One of the most provocative lines to me in Austen was in Sense and Sensibility where it says that Elinor glories in Edward's integrity, which is an odd thing to glory in. You don't glory—nobody is on Instagram showing off their integrity, you know?OLIVER: It's like that René Gerard quote people like to pass around: “Everyone is on diet pills and nobody wants to be a saint.”TRALDI: I like that. That is very Instagrammable.OLIVER: Exactly. Exactly.TRALDI: That's very good, actually. I like that. Yes, so there's something provocative about the notion that virtue can be exciting, and in particular can be romantically exciting.The Importance of IntegrityOLIVER: Or even less than that. One thing I think is difficult for people interpreting Austen today is that virtue, whether it's exciting or romantically exciting, or the notion of integrity is of interest for its own sake.There's a lot of—you know, we have integrity as an organization. It's very important for me to have integrity as a professional. But there's not as much a sense of, just having integrity is the good life. We don't need to be complicated about this. That's just—you should just do that. And Austen's very firm on that all the way through.And criticism wants to pull her towards sometimes feminism, sometimes discussions of slavery, sometimes various other things. And she's just constantly sort of resisting that by saying, “I like integrity. I like good people. I don't think it's that hard.” It's a good line you've picked up on, I think.TRALDI: There's a character in The Wire who says, “A man's gotta have a code.” I think he's Omar, who murders the drug dealers and steals from them.OLIVER: I haven't seen it.TRALDI: So he says, “A man's gotta have a code.” And I think there is a—even in a character who in some ways is bad, we admire the integrity of having a code and sticking to it.There is this debate, I guess in moral philosophy, or at least on the outskirts of moral philosophy, about, “Well, if your code is wrong, maybe it's better not to stick to it.” I don't share that perspective. I think part of the good life is holding yourself to certain standards. And if those standards turn out to be wrong, the holding yourself is still of moral value, right? Not allowing yourself—OLIVER: It doesn't mean they're not adjustable.TRALDI: Yes, no, of course. If you decide the standards are wrong, and in Austen—OLIVER: It's sort of implicit in the idea of having standards that you will be honest and therefore accept when your standards need to be improved or whatever. Right?TRALDI: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And in Austen we certainly see people shifting their standards. And I think one thing that I—of course, modern readers and watchers of Austen do not quite understand some of these things. But I think in Pride and Prejudice in particular, we're supposed to feel that Lizzy Bennet is quite hard on people and has to learn to improve herself in that way.OLIVER: We're delighted with her when she does that because we think it's sassy.TRALDI: Yes, exactly. If you go on YouTube, you can see all these, like, “Lizzy Bennet owning people's lives for 50 minutes,” these compilations of clips from the various movies or whatever. And she's obviously very, very clever.But she realizes—after coming to understand who Wickham is and feeling that she might not have another chance with Darcy, she comes to realize that she has had certain prejudices, which have made her blind to the realities of the world and blind to what might be her best options.So yes, I was saying I believe in integrity; that's all I was saying. And integrity obviously is adjustable, but I tend to think that it's better—even if the rule is wrong, it's better for the person who has it to hold themselves to it, rather than to adjust to try to get an advantage.And in philosophy, we have all sorts of terminology for these sorts of questions: “Are you an internalist or an externalist about reasons or about rules or whatever?” I think the more literary way to say it would just be that integrity is a virtue. And people should stick to their codes unless they see a good reason to change them.Austen and Adam SmithOLIVER: Now, you have recently been reading Adam Smith.TRALDI: Yes, I did read a lot of Adam Smith for this debate we had last week. Although I did a poor job because I had forgotten that the debate was about whether Smith was a philosopher or an economist. [laughter] I thought it was simply, is he a philosopher or not? So I put myself in the odd position of arguing that Adam Smith is not an economist.But yes, I think it's obvious—without knowing the background, I'm sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they're both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there's this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—OLIVER: It's a great time.TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.OLIVER: You've also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It's a very, very fertile—explorations.TRALDI: Yes, yes. There's all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?TRALDI: “A lot” might be—OLIVER: Primarily from Theory of Moral Sentiments.TRALDI: So I would say that the notion of sympathy as being fundamentally part of how you recognize a good person seems to me to be there in Austen. The characters are—OLIVER: And this is the thing about awareness of other people and learning from that awareness.TRALDI: Awareness of other people and learning from other people and feeling other people's emotions. One thing that is related to sympathy in an odd way—and I think actually Austen and Smith conceive of it a bit differently, but that is there for both of them, in particular in Sense and Sensibility—is this notion of self-control or self-command.OLIVER: Self command. Yes. Yes.The Importance of Self-CommandTRALDI: Now, Smith gives a really odd argument about self command, which is that if you don't have control over your emotions, you will end up feeling or expressing something that other people can't sympathize with. And this is bad because sympathy is good, or something like that. I actually think it's a rather confused argument.OLIVER: I think what he's saying is that if you display a lack of self-command, then no matter what you are feeling, people find it difficult to deal with that sort of uncontrolled behavior. It's not the particular expression of feeling; it's the fact that you are a little unstable or—TRALDI: Yes, I think that's right.OLIVER: —a bit extra.TRALDI: I think what Smith doesn't do is explain quite how that's bad. But what I think is that actually, in Sense and Sensibility, it's a little bit the reverse, where actually Elinor and their mother, they do sympathize with Marianne. They do feel what she's feeling after—who's the other, the w guy in Sense and Sensibility? They're all w's.OLIVER: Oh, Willoughby.TRALDI: Willoughby, right, right. Not Wickham, Willoughby. When Willoughby—OLIVER: You can just say “the cad.”TRALDI: The cad. There's always a cad. So when the cad leaves, Marianne has all these emotions, and you really feel them. And Marianne also has a lack of self-command when Willoughby is there. There's this whole episode, which I didn't quite make the most of but felt very important, where they go to the house of this woman. They just sort of barge into this house, Willoughby and Marianne.And this is really supposed to show something about the relationship. If you and your partner barge into somebody's house, it can't be a good relationship somehow because it's leading you into bad actions. That's my sense of what that episode is supposed to show from the highest possible remove.OLIVER: I think, yes, and I think there are several other instances of that: when they ride in the carriage together, unaccompanied.TRALDI: Right, right.OLIVER: And there's a sort of general consternation about this. And Marianne sort of says, “Oh, well, how can it be a problem?” And they—part of the consternation is, you're breaking the rules in a very flagrant way, but also that you are assuming that it's okay because you'll get married. And this assumption is a very big one.TRALDI: Yes. And obviously there is this assumption that—she doesn't recognize quite how—she thinks her position is much more secure than it actually is, which is how it turns out in the book. But I think we're supposed to think that even if she were right about Willoughby's affection, which in a sense, she—Willoughby—OLIVER: No. Even if they do get married, she's broken the rules in a way that—TRALDI: She's broken certain rules in a way that is—but I think what's different from Smith is, there is sympathy from her family even though she lacks self-command. But that is precisely—so it's sort of a different theory of why self-command is good. It's precisely because her emotional state is actually draining for her family.And then Elinor says—when she learns that Elinor has actually been going through something—OLIVER: The same.TRALDI: —very similar, and maybe even rougher, in this whole thing with Lucy Steele telling her about this, you know, blah, blah, blah.OLIVER: Which is a beautiful name—to steal. I mean, it's great.TRALDI: It's an amazing—honestly, in some ways Sense and Sensibility may have been my favorite. I think it's just lovely.OLIVER: If I just wanted to just read one for fun, that's what I go to. I do, yes.TRALDI: Yes. And there's a lot—none of these things are quite perfectly in there. But I think honestly, everything that's in the other novels has a little part to play in Sense and Sensibility. You know, I think if I were to recommend just one, if somebody was like, “I have time for just one,” I might recommend Sense and Sensibility.But in the end, Marianne says—again, it's one of these amazingly evocative lines. Elinor says, “You didn't act that badly. Do you compare your conduct with Willoughby's?” And she says, “No, I compare it with—Elinor, I compare it with your conduct. You have this self-command.”And it's precisely the fact—it's not—and I think this is why philosophers do like Austen, because it's not—it's still literary, but there is a precision to her moral evaluations. It's precisely the fact that Elinor knew that her family loved her and didn't want to burden—it's all quite conscious. She didn't want to burden her family with her emotions. But you actually see that Elinor has this family trait of having very strong sentiment, which Marianne does, and simply also has this virtue of self-command.And that is—there are film adaptations and TV adaptations that demonstrate self-command, but it's a very hard thing to film. It's something you feel inside. It's a very hard—the actors have to be very good for you to see—you see pieces of it in some of the adaptations of Persuasion and some of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, but self-command is very hard to find.Austen AdaptationsOLIVER: Which adaptations do you like the best?TRALDI: I'm forgetting—I often like the long ones that I think were for the British ITV. So I like the—I think Kate Beckinsale was in the Emma one. Although I think there was one of Persuasion, which was also quite good. I like the one of Northanger Abbey. I don't think it's that good, but it's kind of cute, which I think it's probably the cutest of her long novels.Whit Stillman did a very loose adaptation of Lady Susan, which is hilariously funny at times, and also has Kate Beckinsale and some other great actors in it.OLIVER: Did you see the new Persuasion on Netflix a couple of years ago?TRALDI: No. No.OLIVER: It has that—is it Dakota Johnson, the actress, who's famous for other non-Austenian—Fifty Shades of Grey or whatever.TRALDI: Yes, and isn't she one of the Avengers or something like that?OLIVER: Something like that. But everyone was very upset that it was this terrible adaptation.TRALDI: Oh, yes.OLIVER: Didn't—it sort of killed all of Austen's words. She looks at the camera; she drinks from the bottle. I actually thought it was quite fun. On the basis that all adaptations are bad—TRALDI: I think if you allow some looseness, it can be quite fun. So for example, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, I think if you're just sort of like, “Well, this is just somebody who was inspired by Pride and Prejudice,” you can have a lot of fun with the movie.OLIVER: I think as an interpretation of the book, that film is quite bad.TRALDI: Oh, yes. I think it's absolutely missing the mark.OLIVER: But in terms of like, the countryside and the house and the geese and the food, it's fantastic.TRALDI: Oh, yes. It's lovely to look at.OLIVER: The dresses, right? The clothes are amazing.TRALDI: And a lot of the—and the cast is honestly like—OLIVER: Yes, it's great.TRALDI: The cast is really, really great. And the parts as they are—OLIVER: Rosamund Pike is maybe the best Jane on TV.TRALDI: She's terrific. And who's the one who plays Kitty?OLIVER: Yes.TRALDI: Who is in—and the father is the guy from The Hunger Games. I forget his name, but I think the father is excellent in that. But of course, it's not exactly the father from Austen.OLIVER: No, no, no.TRALDI: But as a movie itself—but yes, I like a lot of these longer TV versions.One odd thing—they make these choices. So there is some scholarly apparatus brought to bear on some of them. So I think maybe it's Persuasion that there were multiple versions of, and some of the adaptations use pieces from the unpublished version, which are interesting. And as I was reading it, I had to Google around a bit and figure out these things.Austen's Moral PrecisionTRALDI: I was going to say about Austen's moral precision, the other place where I think this comes in—and I wrote a bit about this in the essay—is near the end of Mansfield Park, when—the names are what I'm worst at—when Edmund, right, is finally disillusioned with—OLIVER: Mary.TRALDI: With Mary Crawford?OLIVER: Mm-hmm.TRALDI: It's because there was this affair. There's always a sibling or a cousin who makes some horrible mistake, you know? So there was this affair, and Mary Crawford can only criticize it by saying that they weren't very prudent, you know, in prudential terms. They took a big risk. They made a bad decision. You know, they really screwed themselves over.OLIVER: They could have made it work. Yes.TRALDI: Yes. And Edmund realizes that she lacks moral fervor because he thinks the appropriate criticism should be a moral one. And as a psychological matter, it shouldn't even enter your head, I think is the idea. I'm extrapolating a bit, but if you see somebody acting this badly, to then say, “Well, geez, you're doing something that isn't in your interest”—for that to be your first thought indicates that your priorities are highly misplaced in a way that, to him, is quite unattractive.And this also struck me as a moment of—this is something we philosophers talk about. What is the distinction between prudence and morality? They both tell you what you should do, in some sense, but there's different—the shoulds have different forces, right? So Edmund has a certain moral precision and sensitivity which, actually, Fanny is basically the only person he knows—not that everybody in the house is a bad person; his father is a decent guy, and one of the aunts is okay, I think.But yes, there's a real sophistication to this evaluation. And it's funny to me that she actually used this as the—I mean, I suspect that even at the time there were readers who were just like, “Wait, I really don't get what the nature of Edmund's problem is here,” because it's not like Mary—Mary's not like, “Oh, yes, I support infidelity.” You know? She's not like— it's if you blinked, you might miss it, the mistake that Mary has made.And so I do think that even though she's not making arguments, she's not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.And I think it's part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who's a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers' Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”OLIVER: And it's a long list.TRALDI: And I think it's a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it's not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.Every Word MattersOLIVER: I mean, one way people talk about the great books is to say that every word matters. And a lot of novelists will say that about their own. Well, you know, Elizabeth Bowen used to say, “What you're doing is to make everything count.” Austen is one of the examples where it's actually true. Every word is being used carefully.TRALDI: Yes. It's funny, this bears on another Twitter argument I had recently about this phrase logographic necessity. Basically, every word in a great book is there for a reason. I think that's right. Although you have to be careful about—if you were to say, “Well, every word in Plato is there for a reason, so you can't really say he's wrong about every—” you would be kind of abandoning the philosophical mission.OLIVER: I mean it in the sense of what you might call the artistic or structural integrity of the book. Not everything has to tell in the meaning sense. But it all holds as a unit for some—TRALDI: Yes. I think everything is there—there is what we could call an internal reason for everything to be there. Everything is there to hold together—OLIVER: Like the making of a piece of furniture or something.TRALDI: And I think you hear—I think this is one thing that—and not all classical music, but I think it's one thing that distinguishes classical music even from very good contemporary pop music or jazz or rock music, is that you have this sense of, “Yes, every note I hear basically is holding up a larger structure of some sort.”OLIVER: Yes. And Jane Austen is very Mozart in that way.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's right. Yes.Austen's Place in Great Books ProgramsOLIVER: So should Jane Austen have a bigger place on great books programs, based on all these things you've said about her?TRALDI: Yes, this is—so, there was actually a debate—I did not write the piece in response to this debate, but this is—OLIVER: Tanner Greer.TRALDI: Yes, there was—Tanner Greer weighed in on this, and my friend Circe. I think—OLIVER: I think they're just desperately wrong.TRALDI: You think they don't—that she—OLIVER: I think Emma is obviously a book that should be on one of these syllabuses. Maybe Sense and Sensibility.TRALDI: Yes. I think the ones I would consider are Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park. I do think they're actually longer than I realized, which is always—I mean, there are these very practical concerns with putting together a syllabus.OLIVER: Sure, sure. Although I want to ask you about that, because my response to a lot of these debates, which is maybe just because of where I studied, but just make them read more. And if they don't do the reading, that's their, you know—TRALDI: That's true. Well, I don't want to get into this too much. We already make them read a lot compared to—so for example, a year ago, I had my students read two novels in a week, which is more than most courses make college students read.OLIVER: But that's by no means unreasonable.TRALDI: No, no, of course, of course.OLIVER: You know.TRALDI: Well, exigencies of the teenage mind aside—OLIVER: Because I often think this, when people debate how things should be taught and why it's so important to keep these programs, and they'll talk about the importance of writing essays. And then it turns out the students maybe write one essay a semester. And I sort of think, well, who cares? All this rhetoric for one essay.TRALDI: Yes. I don't know if I'm really ever going to assign essays again. It just is—the age of AI is upon us.OLIVER: Sure. But you see what I mean.TRALDI: No, yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I do think reading a lot is the main part of—and certainly, you know, when I read all seven of these in two weeks, that's much more reading than I normally do, as well, to write this essay.OLIVER: But you didn't have to lie on the sofa afterwards with a cold compress. You were fine.TRALDI: In a way it was a really good two weeks. If you get to read—I mean, this is why we have good lives, right? If you get to read Jane Austen and you call that work, it's a nice life.OLIVER: So yes, will you be putting Emma on your program?TRALDI: I would definitely consider Emma. I would definitely consider Sense and Sensibility. I would consider Mansfield Park. I think these are the ones that have—the moral element is very prominent. But it's obviously there in all of her books.OLIVER: You can have a really good moral discussion about Mansfield Park, which is a bigger, broader thing than Pride and Prejudice, for example.TRALDI: Yes, I think so. I would definitely consider—in the 1800s there were—obviously the British novel of the 1800s was a big deal, and there's—OLIVER: [laughs] We did quite well, yes.TRALDI: You all did quite well. So the ones we did at Tulsa—we had Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. And then we had one Irish, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And I don't think anybody—if you replaced one of those with Emma or Mansfield Park, I don't think anybody would say, “Oh, you made a horrible call.”OLIVER: I think Tanner's point was that you simply don't have that many slots for an English novel that deals with these sorts of ideas, and that it should obviously be Middlemarch because that is the bigger novel. It's about bigger questions of society. It's about the whole—it's got more greatness in it, whereas Austen is sort of more about the individual.TRALDI: So I do think that this question of greatness—I think there are some people who read Austen and they think, “Well, this is—obviously it has all these sorts of themes, but it's not great. It has this littleness to it. It has this smallness to it.”OLIVER: It's domestic.TRALDI: That is not my reading of it. I think if that's the question, I don't feel that way. I think it pulls out these great themes about the nature of virtue and the nature of moral learning, becoming a better person, the nature of love. We read Sappho. We read the Symposium.To me, you read Wuthering Heights and you say, “Oh, this is a really big book because it's about society and how trauma gets passed down, and it has these horror elements, and it's very dark.” But actually, it's quite hard to figure out, how do we turn Wuthering Heights in a discussion about how to live? With Austen, it's just completely straightforward.OLIVER: [laughs] How not to live, maybe.TRALDI: Yes. In Austen, it's just completely straightforward. This is the discussion. This is what she had in mind as well, this question of how to live. So to me, Austen is completely—in terms of her successes as an artist, she belongs. In terms of her themes, she belongs. So I would not rule her out. I think she is absolutely a great, and who knows what that means, but I think she would be completely appropriate on any of these syllabi.Reading PlansOLIVER: Very good. And what will you read next?TRALDI: What will I read next? I mean, our—from the beginning, I'm thinking I should read some more poetry. It's been a while. Actually, speaking of—this is funny. Well, I want to get into William Empson. He had an odd life, which I think somebody should do like a movie about him or something.OLIVER: Yes, he'd make a great movie.TRALDI: I think Empson would be a good movie. So that might be—OLIVER: Are you going to read the poems or the criticism?TRALDI: Probably a little of both, but that's for a while from now. I think, you know, at the moment I'm back to reading philosophy. So what novel will I read next? That's a good question. What should I read next?OLIVER: If you like Jane Austen?TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Maybe read one of the people that she admired, like Samuel Richardson or Fanny Burney, someone like that.TRALDI: You know, I do think—you saying Samuel Richardson reminded me, I've read very little Samuel Johnson. I think reading some of the great critics, I think, writing this piece—OLIVER: Oh, Johnson, yes. You would like Johnson.TRALDI: I think I would like Johnson. I think I would like Empson. The history of literary criticism is something I have very, very little idea of.OLIVER: Oh, well, then, Johnson. I mean, he's the best.TRALDI: Yes, I think I should, I should definitely read Johnson.OLIVER: English literary criticism begins and ends with Samuel Johnson.TRALDI: You know what, this is a little different, but—I might have talked about this with you a little bit—I want to read The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville, because reading about Smith—a lot of the ideas that we think of as Smithian are actually Mandevillian, and he kind of moderated them.OLIVER: Well, he hated Mandeville.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Very hard on him.TRALDI: Yes. So a lot—like the invisible hand, it's only a small part of Smith's thinking, but it was like the entirety of Mandeville's thinking, this sort of dynamic.OLIVER: Well, I think it means different things for them. I think Mandeville, in a funny way, is more philosophical in the sense you were saying, and trying to make these propositions. And Smith was saying, “Well, what about feelings? What about all these funny things that we can't account for? Like, look around. It's too messy.”TRALDI: No, that makes sense to me. Yes, I think between Mandeville and Smith, Mandeville is somebody who thought virtue was sort of like a con.OLIVER: A fool's game.TRALDI: Exactly. You're sort of a sucker if you try to be virtuous.OLIVER: I think he also just assumed that if you were commercial, you were obviously on the get.TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it's one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can't really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”OLIVER: There's a discussion in one of Hayek's papers, which is—it's a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it's not so much that I'm trying to get information about the thing you're trying to sell me, but I'm really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there's a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they're all working on that problem together.TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it's often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else's character?OLIVER: Exactly.TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?OLIVER: And if you're too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it's really, really hard.TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else's character?In philosophy, we do ask, what is a good character and what is the good action in this sort of situation? What is the bad action in this sort of situation? But it's not for the philosopher to say, “Okay, in the sorts of situations you're likely to be in, what do you pay—where do you direct your attention to try to figure out these things about?”And it's not—I don't think Austen—it's not super subtle either. In Persuasion—I mentioned in the essay—in Persuasion, it starts out by saying Anne really cared about paying off the family's debts, and the rest of her family didn't give a s**t, you know? And it's sort of like, okay, so we just immediately are like, Anne's the sort of person who you might want to have a business transaction with because if she has a debt to you, she might actually pay it. And I forget if that's the exact detail, but it's something like that, you know?OLIVER: And there's also the novelist—Jane Austen is very good at what you don't see, which aga

di Matteo B. Bianchi | In questa puntata primaverile conosciamo Caterina Pusateri, libraia di Palermo e da poco autrice de "La lettrice impaziente. Storia di una libraia" (SEM); con Federica Rustichelli parliamo del suo originale progetto Libri Col Francobollo e del suo amore per romanzi epistolari, lettere e corrispondenze a ritmo lento, rigorosamente analogiche. Il consiglio di lettura finale arriva invece dall'autrice Cristina Marconi. Libri consigliati in questo episodio:  LA CARITÀ CARNALE di Monica Acito, Bompiani; LA MATTINA SCRIVO di Franck Cortés, Playground; IL LIBRO DI MOEBIUS di Catherine Lacey, SurI; L DOSSIER RACHEL di Martin Amis, Einaudi; MOSTRI di Claire Dederer, Iperborea in collaborazione con il Post; IL CLUB DEL LIBRO E DELLA TORTA DI BUCCE DI PATATA DI GUERNSEY di Mary Ann Shaffer e Annie Barrows, Astoria; CARO SIMENON, MON CHER FELLINI, Adelphi; IL NEMICO di Federica De Paolis, Feltrinelli Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it take to write strong sentences? How do you keep writing when the world feels dark? How do you push past self-doubt, build a sustainable writing practice, and trust that your voice is enough? Anne Lamott and Neal Allen share decades of hard-won wisdom from their new book, Good Writing. In the intro, Hachette cancels allegedly AI-written book [The New Publishing Standard]; How Pangram works; Publishing industry insights from Macmillan's CEO [David Perell Podcast]; Photos from Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle; The Black Church; Bones of the Deep coming in April. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why strong verbs are rule number one How Anne and Neal's contrasting styles created a unique call-and-response writing guide Practical advice on finding and trusting your authentic voice across genres Why award-winning novelists typically write for only 90 minutes a day — and what that means for your writing practice How to keep writing during dark and discouraging times without giving up The uncomfortable truth about publication, longevity, and why nobody cares if you write You can find Neal at ShapesOfTruth.com and Anne on Substack. Transcript of the interview with Neal Allen and Anne Lamott Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences Jo: Welcome to the show, Neal and Anne. Anne: Thank you so much, Jo. We're happy to be here. Neal: Hi, Jo. Jo: Let us get straight into the book with rule one, which is use strong verbs. How can we implement that practically in our manuscripts when most of us don't start with the verb? We're thinking of story or we're thinking of message? Neal: Throughout the book, it's pointed out that these are rules for second drafts, right? So you've put it down. You've already got your story down, you've already got your piece down—your email, your text, it doesn't matter what. Then you stop, you pause, you go back to the beginning and you go sentence by sentence and look at them. Anne: I'd like to add that there's a lot in the book, usually on my end of the conversation, that has to do with really using these rules anywhere and everywhere. Whether you're writing a memoir or a grant proposal, I believe these rules apply to getting everything written at any time, in any phase of the work because, from Bird by Bird, I'm all about taking short assignments and writing really godawful first drafts. What is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back right then and just start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. One place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are. If I say “Jo walked towards us across the lawn,” it doesn't give the reader very much information. But if I say “Jo lurched towards us across the lawn,” or “Jo raced towards us across the lawn,” then right away you've improved the sentence with really two or three quick thoughts about what you actually meant with that verb and a better one. So it really applies to every level and stage of writing, but Neal's right—this is really about going back over your work sentence by sentence and seeing if you can make it stronger and cleaner and clearer. The reason it's rule one is to write strong verbs. Neal: A nice thing about strong verbs is that they often preclude the need for an adjective or an adverb, right? If I say “I trudged,” it's shorter than saying “I walked slowly and depressed.” Jo: Absolutely, and how you answered that question is kind of how the book works, right? Because Neal does an outline of the rule, and then Anne comes in and comments. Maybe you could talk a bit about that process. You are both strong characters, obviously you've been writing a long time. Talk a bit about how you made the book and how that worked as a couple as well. Neal: I'd had these rules collected for a number of years and I had them on my website. When I met Anne, she liked them and would hand them out when she was doing writing sessions. I was intrigued at some point a few years ago and looked around to see whether there was a list like mine out there. I noticed that all the other lists I saw were much shorter. Hemingway had his four rules for rewriting. Elmore Leonard, his eight, which are wonderful. Margaret Atwood has 10. The longest I saw was Martin Amis had, depending on what year it was, 14, 15 or 16—he'd go back and forth with a couple of them. I had 30-some and I wondered, well, 30-some might be enough for a book. I didn't want to write a scolding book like on grammar. I didn't want it to be academic or written like “I'm the expert, I know.” I'll just let my mind range. I'll explain the rule and then let my mind go where it went. Which, by the way, is one of the rules—show then tell. Not “show, don't tell.” It's show, then tell. Let your mind riff after you've explained something to the reader or shown something to the reader. So I wrote the book. It was too short to be published, and I showed it to Anne and I asked her, “What do I do with this?” Anne: I said, “Hey, I know something about writing, Bub,” and I asked if I could contribute my thoughts and retorts and examples and prompts to each of his rules. We were just off and running because his stuff was so solid. Mine is more maybe welcoming and giving encouragement and hope to writers because writing's hard. It's still hard for me. This is my 21st book and I'm only a third of it. Writing's hard, and what we hope is that our conversation can help people understand: a) it's hard for everybody, and b) it'll work if you just keep your butt in the chair and do the best you can, and then go back one day at a time and try to make it a little bit better. Neal: It turned out to be pretty serendipitous because just naturally I'm more of an explainer and Annie is more driving toward catharsis. So the call and response is always: I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness. Jo: In some chapters you do disagree in some form. How did that work in the process of writing? Anne: Usually I disagree because Neal might be using words that are too big, or it might be a little bit elitist, I would think. Or of course I would point out that he's completely overeducated, whereas I'm a dropout and so I have a much plainer, more welcoming version of the rules. All of the rules are so strong, but I would feel that the way he explained it was beyond me. So I would come in and try to explain what Neal had been explaining. It was actually really funny and fun. We do come from really different directions. Neal is an explainer. He's like an ATM of information, and I am the class den mother who brings in treats and party favours on everybody's birthday. My message is always: you can really, really do this, I promise, trust me. But you start where you are, you get your butt in the chair, and then Neal comes along and says what has worked for him. He was a journalist forever, so he writes in a very different way than I write. It just turned out that the two of us together kind of make a whole. People have asked us if there were a lot of conflicts or if we really objected to the other person's take. I can tell you, Jo, there wasn't a day when we had only conflict. We were just laughing and we were excited because one of us would remember a great example from literature. We came to believe that these two very distinct voices would form one voice of encouragement for any writer. Jo: That brings us to rule number eight, which is trust your voice. I feel like this is easier when you've been writing a while. We're told to find our voice, but I remember as an early writer when I read Bird by Bird and other books and I was like, “How on earth do I find my voice?” Maybe you could talk about this more for early stage writer. How do you find and trust that voice? Neal: Boy, that is a halt for almost all of us. This follows from any intellectual pursuit that requires lots of practice and repetitions. Malcolm Gladwell's great statement, or discovery, or restatement from somebody else who discovered it, that the human brain requires 10,000 hours of repetitions before something can be allowed to just flow without thought. Flow as if intuitive rather than thinking. I don't think that's any different in writing than it is in basketball or football or anything else—sports, creative pursuits, everyday pursuits. There's just a lot of repetitions required. Some people have the experience that I did, where you're just going along getting better and better, doing it over and over again, learning this, learning that, adding in this, adding in that, moving toward a goal of virtuosity or whatever. And all of a sudden, bang, one day, it all works and your voice emerges. Other people don't have that experience, don't have that one day that it happened or that feeling that it suddenly happened. For some people it takes less than 10,000 hours, but for most people it is a hell of a lot of repetitions. Anne: I think for me, the most important aspect to finding your own voice is noticing how desperately you don't think your voice is good enough and that you want to write like somebody else. I always mention that when I was coming up, at about 20, I wanted to sound like Isabel Allende because I loved her work so much. Or Ann Beattie, who was writing those wonderful short stories in the New Yorker. Or Salinger, who I'd started reading probably at 10 years old. I had to come to the understanding that I can't tell my stories and my truth and my version of life—which is really what writing is—in somebody else's voice. Unless it's a kind of advanced writing exercise to write in the voice of an alcoholic billionaire in Spain. For most of us, it's about finding out that our voice is what people want to hear. It's hard to believe, but it is absolutely true. If you have a story to tell me, Jo, I just want you to tell me your story. I don't want you to try to sound like Virginia Woolf or Margaret Drabble. I want you to be Jo. If it's the written version you're sending me, I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules. But spiritually and psychologically, this is just about the most important rule of all because that's why we're here. That's why we are on this side of eternity—to discover who we are and why we're here. Part of that is discovering who, deep down, when all the layers are peeled away, we are, and then how to communicate that to a reader. Without trying to sound more impressive or more brilliant or more ironic than we actually are, our voice is good enough. It's hard to believe. Our voice is what we want you to tell us your stories in. Neal: I distinctly remember the day I found my voice, for odd reasons. I just can remember it, and the first thing I did when this story felt like it had written itself to me was look at it and go, “Crap. That doesn't sound like Faulkner.” Jo: It sounded like you. Anne: Or bad Faulkner. Jo: Do you think we have to find our voice maybe multiple times, depending on genre? For example, I recognised that feeling with one of my novels. It was novel number five. I was like, “Oh, that's my voice.” But then it took me a lot longer to find that in memoir because, well, I think memoir is super hard. Do you think we have to go through these 10,000 hours in different genres? Neal: Not for me. I don't think any differently about how I'm entering into a business letter, a text, a novel, a self-help book, or any of the things that I do. I feel like I just have to turn this switch and let it go, and I can trust myself. So that's interesting. I can imagine you could develop a second voice. I haven't ever needed to. Anne: I would agree that I write my novels and my nonfiction really from a kind of central bus station deep inside of me. One of our rules is write the hard things—write about life and death and loss and grief and relationships and getting old and being here during these incredibly cold, dark times. Because the reader, i.e. me, is just desperate for truth and for real. I started out wanting to sound like John Updike or sound like a New York glitterati male writer, and I can't tell you what is really real in somebody else's voice. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. I think it's 10 hours—a little bit different there. But when I'm writing autobiographical spiritual pieces or my novels, I have to kind of settle myself down, like gentling a horse, and find that bus station inside of myself where I'm observing and I'm tugging on the sleeve of the person sitting next to me and saying, “I just saw something really interesting. Do you have a minute?” That's really what writing is. I just saw something or thought of something or imagined something or remembered something really interesting. Do you have a minute? If I'm talking to the person next to me, I'm not going to try to sound like Laurence Olivier or anybody else. I'm just going to tell them my story. The best four or five word great quote is from our screenwriter friend, Randy Mayem Singer, and she said: “Tell me a story. Make me care.” Those six words really transcend all genres. It's just: I can tell you a story my way if you're interested. Got a minute? Jo: You mentioned that, really interesting, you said, “I need to settle myself down,” particularly in these dark times. This is not a political show, and obviously we're all from different countries here and we all have different views of what difficult times are, but we all go through them. When big things in the world make us feel like perhaps what we are doing is not so important, how do we get through that? That “shouldn't I go do something more important than writing a story” feeling? Neal: Everybody is encouraged to be a political scientist nowadays, or to be an ethicist or to be a moralist as their job, and that's kind of ridiculous, right? We've been handed our role. By the time you're 30, you've been handed your role in the world, and that's your productive role. You have certain citizenship requirements, which might include voting or marching or watching the news every day. That's not the rest of your day unless you actually work in parliament as an aide or doing some kind of social policy work. I am not going to let the external world ruin my day. I'm going to keep that to a certain number of minutes of my day that is appropriate to my role in the world. I am perfectly productive in the world. I have lots of things that I do. I work hard. Everybody works hard. There are no lazy people in this world any more—civilisation's too difficult. You want lazy? Go back to 300,000 years of tribal life, where as soon as you had fulfilled your last need for calories for the day, you made it back to camp slowly so you didn't burn calories, and lulled from about 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. The rest of the day you reclined so you weren't burning calories and gossiped with your fellow tribespeople. None of us is like that now. I'm perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the foibles of the species. Anne: Neal does something with his clients, with whom he does this work on taming the inner critic. It's about having them make a list of what they do every day. Rain or shine or catastrophe or peace or war or whatever, you just do it. I wake up, I pray, I put my glasses on. I get a little bit of work done every day. I meditate for 15 minutes every day. I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritual reset button I can get to. I catch up with my friends. We have a grandson here. We hang out with him. I do certain things every day, and one of them is I get a little bit of work done. Of course what I'd rather do is just stay glued to CNN and have my tiny opinions on every single thing that is happening and how things would be better if they followed my always excellent advice. Instead, what I do is I will meditate for 50 minutes a day and it won't be really beautiful and inspiring—it'll be like a monkey at the mall who's over-caffeinated. I will also get outside. I don't know if I'll get a really good long walk with 10,000 steps in, but I will get outside and I will pay attention. I will breathe in fresh air. I will have moments of wonder. I will also sit down, and I will be doing it after we talk. I'm going to get my own writing done for the day. I really recommend that to writing students: write down what you do every day. And in it, figure out at least one pod—a 45-minute pod—where you can get a little bit of writing done. Something that may serve the writers in your audience is that I make long lists and I encourage all beginning writers to make long lists of every memory and thought and idea that they've had. But mostly memories, often starting very young. Thinking about early holidays and school are great prompts. Make a list of 25 memories you have that you've told people over the years that are meaningful to you. If you remember them, they're meaningful. You may think that they're meaningful because of this or that, but you sit down and you write about them for 45 minutes and you're going to discover that there was a kernel of insight, or even healing, in them that you hadn't known when you set out to write them. I taught writing forever at this bookstore called Book Passage in Marin. We would spend a part of every hour having the writers, the students, explain to me why they weren't getting any writing done, and they were excellent ideas. Any excuse your listeners have about why they're not getting any writing done—believe me, it's a good excuse and I've heard it 10 times. If you are committed to writing, you have to meet us halfway, and that means that you set aside 45 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever you can give me to get a little bit of writing done. Get one passage written—the first or eighth thing on the list of really important memories that you've carried in your pocket all these years. Neal: The typical amount of time that a Booker Prize winner, or a National Book Award winner here in America, spends writing—a novelist—is one to two hours in the morning, getting 45 minutes to an hour and a half of work done, a thousand to 1,500 words. And then they stop. The reason they stop is it's really brain-consuming. To do this is hard work, and it's intellectually vigorous. High-end programmers can work two and a half hours on average before they have to stop because they've used up their brain energy—the blood going to the brain and expending calories and whatever is going on in there. It's not a long time. It's just repetitive time. The Booker Prize winners, they typically work six days a week, not five days a week. An hour and a half a day is about the mean. About 1,200 words is about the mean. Jo: It's interesting because you mentioned what's stopping people from writing, and you also mentioned it's hard work. One of the things I've heard a lot recently is: “This is really hard. I thought writing was meant to be this romantic myth where I would sit down and things would stream into my brain and it would be easy. And if it's not easy and fun, then maybe it's wrong for me.” So maybe you could explain more about the hardness and why hard is still good. Hard doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Neal: The interesting thing about writers is that they are really interested in very complex thinking about sentences. A few things distinguish a writer from a subject matter expert or a plotter—who either writes plots and is interested in the movement of plots, or who is a subject matter expert in something and either novelises it or writes nonfiction. It's that a writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow of a paragraph really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter. I don't care what the subject matter is. What I want to concentrate on ultimately is the sentence. And getting a sentence to look right in context requires building sentences upon sentences upon sentences. It's more like painting than it is like writing in that sense. If you look at a painter, once they've put one brushstroke down—and usually it takes them a while to figure out what that brushstroke is, how big it is, how wide it is, how thick it is, how grainy it is—then the second brushstroke becomes a puzzle based on what they just did with the first brushstroke and the remaining canvas. A writer thinks that way about each sentence and realises that each sentence has layers of information in it—diction, colour, rhythm, harmony, melody, plot, all sorts of things are happening. How many of those are taken care of in that sentence? Well, that becomes the interest. It's hard in the sense that to be virtuosic at it, to be really good at it, requires a lot of study and a lot of mistakes. Most of the mistakes are getting rid of clichés and finding your way past them, and that's a long, long process. This isn't something that can be just picked up because you have a talent. You were told at a certain time you were a talented writer, so you can just pick it up. As soon as you get into it, you see that the sentences are demanding a heck of a lot of work. Anne: I would add that I don't find it all that fun and easy—I never find it fun and easy. I've been doing this professionally for 52 years now, since I was 20, when I worked at a magazine. I think that's an illusion. So much of becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant and how it would go. That you would sit alone like Bartleby the Scrivener, hunched over working on your ledger. That was not true at all, because a lot of our book, Good Writing, has to do with the collaboration between you and a writing partner, a writing group or a writing collective, and eventually an editor. It's not about that lonely, hunched-over romantic, Wuthering Heights sense of seriousness. And it's also not giddy. It's not Walt Disney. It's just very real. It's one human sitting down at the desk with paper or at the keyboard, and it is just trying, one day at a time, to write what's on your heart, what's on your mind, what's on your scribbled notes, what you're trying to transcribe from this little bit of a flicker of an idea about something that you've always meant to tell on paper. And then writing it. Some parts of the day's work will be pulling teeth. The secret of writing—and I write about this a lot in Bird by Bird, I write a lot about it in Good Writing—is you just don't give up. Because you wanted to be a writer when you grew up. What that means is that you write a little bit every day and you read about writing. You read good books on writing. You read Stephen King. You read William Zinsser. You read all the Paris Review interviews of writers at work. You enter into the writing life because it's a calling, like a monk to a monastery. You've gotten into the water, it's a little cold at first, and you stay in it. And it starts to be something that is so fulfilling, if maybe not fun. It's fulfilling. You will feel this rare excitement that you're doing what you have put off for so long, or that you're re-entering it in a new way with a different sense of commitment and maybe a little bit more wisdom and probably a lot more stories to tell. Jo: I did want to ask Anne, because coming back to Bird by Bird, many writers listening will have read it. I've also read over the years about your son and your faith. These are really personal things that you have shared. It feels like we live in this age of judgement and cancellation, and writing what you call our truths can be very difficult. People are afraid. What would you say to them? And obviously also rule 33 is “write hard stuff”, so I guess that gets into it too. How do we do this? Anne: A lot of people don't have the calling to write personal stuff or autobiographical stuff or stuff about spiritual or emotional or psychological healing. They want to write about England in the 1300s. I've always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they're creating it. If they love to read historical romances, or they love to read journals—I have to say, I read every single journal of Virginia Woolf's in my early twenties, and I read every single volume of her letters in my early twenties. It was thrilling to be in that intimate, umbilical connection to a writer that I loved so much, and into the world of Bloomsbury, and into the world of England between the wars. People may not want to write like I write, and I would assume they don't. My calling is that I love to write about real life and I use my immediate experiences of daily living and my family and my husband and our animals and my nation and my recovery and my church. All of that is the stuff that I love to come upon in other people's work, and so I write it. Neal writes differently. He is a journalist and a novelist, and he is writing a lot in a much more sociological way than I am. He is writing with this font of knowledge about socioeconomic and historical understanding of the world. Yet he's just raggedy old Neal Allen, but he loves to come upon different stuff than I love to come upon. Does that answer your question? Neal: I think one thing to notice is that the whole bully-victim cycle that we are promoting and living in now—and it's a cycle because if somebody claims that they have been bullied, then their only defence is to become a bully themselves. The victims become the bullies. It just gets worse and worse. It's the old revenge story. What I've noticed when I think about it is the authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists. Humanists tend not to be cancelled, and I've never felt a great danger. Of course, I watch my words in certain ways that are fashionable—you can't use this word any more, and all of that. But in terms of ideas, humanists embrace the world in a funny, different kind of way than people who chase after conflict, chase after separation of people from each other, tribalism, all of that. When I look back, my heroes were always humanists. Some of them might be cancelled now, but just for the weirdest reasons—like Henry Miller or Mark Twain might be cancelled for very strange reasons. These are absolute humanists who love everybody in the world in a certain kind of odd way. Virginia Woolf is the most incredible humanist in the world. She's not going to be cancelled. Jo: She cancelled herself. Neal: There we go. Jo: As we come towards the end, I do want to return to something—you've both talked about calling and you've been handed your role, and this sort of “we are writers now.” Both of you have had great longevity in the career, and I've been doing this now 20 years. I've noticed so many people who leave the writing life, so I wondered what tips you had on making it long term. How do we do this long term, assuming we are feeling a calling? People have to balance the money side, they're balancing book marketing, which is always a nightmare for all of us, and the writing. Any tips for longevity? Neal: I have no idea. I have lived outside of the writing life, just kind of using it as a secondary skill, for half of my life. I left journalism because it didn't pay well enough to support a family of six. I moved into the corporate world. I loved the corporate world. I didn't have any problem with it, but it wasn't the writing world. When I came out of the corporate world, I first went into “tame your inner critic” sessions with people—executive coaching, other kinds of coaching. Only lately, only in the last 10 years, have I really resumed my writing career. I think maintaining a writing career, like anything in the arts, is incredibly difficult financially. It just will be. Annie will tell you—you were, what, 15 years into your career before you had your first home office? Anne: Yes. Neal: Right. Anne: More than that. I was 20 years in before I had a door I could close to keep the Huns out—i.e. my child. Here's the thing: nobody cares if you write, if you hate it, or if you've given up. It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It might be that you're a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she's incredible. If you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside a pod. I keep using the word pod because that's how I get any work done at all—an hour. Now, Neal and I can both tell you, and Neal alluded to this: you set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we'll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That's how it works. If you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life—I hate to sound like a Nike ad, and I don't know if you have this in England—but you just do it. One thing that gets in everybody's way is this fantasy of getting published and how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped “validated” on their parking ticket and their self-esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before. We can tell you: we've got this book that's out, brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published. Because how's it going to do? Is it going to get reviewed? There are very, very few places reviewing books any more. Carol Shields, who wrote an incredible book 30 years ago called The Stone Diaries. She was teaching large, large writing retreats, a thousand people at a time, and she would tell them that five to 10 of them will be published. Getting published means that you get your book out and you have one week to make it. You have one week in the bookstores for it to get noticed. And there are 180,000 hardback books published in America every year in general interest. So you write a novel that's about a small town. You have great dreams that it's going to be an Oprah book and that this is going to happen and it will lead to a second contract, and then you can start investing in diamonds or buy a set of fish forks. It doesn't happen. My first book that made any money at all for me was my fifth book. It was a journal of my son's first year called Operating Instructions, and it was the first time that I didn't have to have a second job. I was 38, and I had been writing—and writing full time—since I was 20 and publishing since I was 26. If the carrot that is enticing you to get any new work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it's not going to happen for you. I can just promise you that. If your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community and to write—and it will be discouraging—but if you want to write, you just keep pushing back your sleeves. You don't get up. You sit down and you keep your butt in the chair. If your work is really good, it may get published. If your work is excellent, it may not. But that can't be what gets you to commit to being a writer when you grow up. Jo: Fantastic. So where can people find Good Writing and all your books and everything you both do online? Neal: On March 17th the book comes out. You can get it online, anywhere online. It's published by Penguin Avery. March 17th, it gets released. Anne: As we said, it'll be in the bookstores for a while. Neal: It'll be in the bookstores in America. You might have to go online in Great Britain at first. Jo: Oh yes, it's definitely there. And what about your websites as well? Anne: I don't have a website. Neal: I have a modest website at ShapesOfTruth.com. That tells you about my other books also. Anne: I'm at Substack, Anne Lamott. I'm on Facebook, Anne Lamott. I'm kind of all over the place. But this is kind of terrifying: 80% of books bought in America are bought at Amazon on cell phones. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Actually, I was going to ask—have you recorded the audiobook as a pair? Anne: Yes, we have. It's available if you go—I hate to always be plugging Amazon, but it's so easy. If you go to Amazon, it'll give you a choice of hardback or audio or Kindle. Neal: And if you don't want to go to Amazon and want to find another place to buy it that you feel more comfortable with, go to Penguin Random House and just put in “Good Writing, Anne Lamott.” I think it'll take you to a splash page that gives you a choice of a half dozen online places to order it. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, both of you, for your time. This has been brilliant. Anne: Oh, Jo, thank you. Pleasure and an honour. Thank you for having us. Neal: Thank you, Jo. As you can see, we really get turned on talking about this! Anne: Yes, we do.The post Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

For this episode of My Martin Amis, we're plugging into the London recording studio of the New Statesman magazine.From the intro: "Founded by economists and social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1913, the New Statesman has enjoyed a long history of finding and fostering journalistic and literary talent. In the early Seventies, the paper went through a succession of editors, during which time its circulation hit a low ebb. Among its staff then were two bright talents who became close friends through their employer. They sported flared trousers, yellowed fingertips and hair of thickness and length relatively similar to my guests. Their names were Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. Half a century later, minus the flares and barely disguised homoerotic tension (although who knows what we'll learn on this episode), a new duo stalks the newsroom."Jack's guests on this episode are George Monaghan, the New Statesman's junior commissioning editor, and Nick Harris, its ideas editor. At 27, they are both in the prime of their youth, yet have chosen to speak about what Amis taught them in Experience on the eternally fertile subjects of love, life, and literature.FOLLOW US ON X: @mymartinamisYOUTUBE: @mymartinamispod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Giovanna Granato"Tripla eco"H.E. BatesAdelphi Edizioniwww.adelphi.it«Dopo sessant'anni di scrittura e di lettura, metterei H.E. Bates tra i migliori autori di racconti del mio tempo» (Graham Greene).Traduzione di Giovanna GranatoSiamo nel cuore vivo, intimamente vulnerabile, della campagna inglese, la seconda guerra mondiale è al terzo anno e il marito della protagonista è da tempo prigioniero dei giapponesi. Isolata, lontana anche dal minuscolo centro abitato, la donna conduce un'esistenza selvatica, scandita dai ritmi della natura, e solo l'irruzione di un giovane soldato in licenza, refrattario alla vita militare, rompe la solitudine. Quando il ragazzo decide di disertare, lei lo asseconda e, in virtù della sua bellezza eterea, quasi femminea, non esita a travestirlo in modo da farlo passare per la sorella agli occhi di eventuali curiosi. La relazione sembra reggere sui trampoli del magato idillio, finché un brutale sergente della polizia militare non s'invaghisce della «sorella», con le conseguenze del caso. Tutto rimarrà ambiguo sino all'ultimo, prima di convergere nell'esito beffardo tracciato a punta secca dalla sorte.Rarissimo è incontrare un racconto così calibrato, perfetto in ogni dettaglio, dalla cadenza del fraseggio al susseguirsi delle stagioni, dai colori del paesaggio agli umori dei personaggi, dai tuoni alle risate, fino al senso di prigionia che la neve insinua nell'«estasi del vuoto», nell'incosciente attesa di uno sparo, o della sua eco. E non possiamo che essere grati a Bates per questo incontro.Giovanna Granato ha fatto della traduzione il suo unico mestiere. Oltre a buona parte dell'opera di David Foster Wallace, ha tradotto Colm Tóibín, Edna O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Norman Mailer, Emma Cline, Martin Amis, Michel Faber. Nel 2019 ha vinto il premio Letteraria della città di Fano per la traduzione di La casa dei nomi di Colm Tóibín.Diventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.Rob chose to talk about London Fields, the novel we first encounter on this series through the Financial Times columnist, Janan Ganesh. But whereas Ganesh grew up in Croydon in the late Eighties, with the London Amis depicts in the novel practically on his doorstep, Doyle had never been to England's capital when the cover of London Fields first caught his eye, aged 23, from the shelves of a book exchange at a backpacker's hostel in South East Asia.On a long bus journey in this far-flung part of the world, Doyle recounts coming to terms with the alchemic mastery of Amis's prose in this 1989 masterpiece. London Fields, he says, blended seamlessly the very highest ideas with the very lowest, all to great comic effect. Writing about London, Amis was engaged in an act of philosophy, dredged up from the deepest pits of urban and human decay.Rob and Jack go on to discuss that force of nature that is of course Keith Talent. Talent is for Doyle, as he is for Ganesh, not just one of Amis's greatest characters, but one of the greatest characters ever to cast a shadow on the history of English literature. Of all Amis's beleaguered and benighted male creations, Talent is also arguably the happiest, since apart from anything else, he would be the least bothered by Amis's contempt for him. Later on, Rob and Jack talk about the world Amis so often condemns his male characters to live in. Whether we look to John Self (a man consumed by his own oniomania), the bleak rivalry that sets Keith Talent and Guy Clinch on their fateful course with Nicola Six, or indeed that which Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry must see through a novel later in The Information, Amis's men are rarely sanguine creatures.Male conflict and humiliation were two of Amis's greatest subjects, but while Doyle still regards Amis as one of the best writers ever to interrogate them in their art, he is less convinced by Amis's opposition outlook on male relationships now, in his forties, than he was as a younger man.Happy New Year to you, dear listener. 2026 has begun.FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamisFIND US ON YOUTUBE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sir Salman Rushdie is a writer who has written over 20 books, seven of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize. In 1981 he won with his novel Midnight's Children which also topped the polls for the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize, making it the most lauded novel in Booker history.He was born in Bombay in 1947 and educated at Rugby School in Warwickshire. After studying history at the University of Cambridge he worked as a copywriter at various advertising agencies before publishing his first novel Grimus in 1975. His breakthrough came with Midnight's Children and he was one of 20 writers named on Granta magazine's inaugural list of Best Young British novelists alongside writers including Martin Amis and AN Wilson.He attracted considerable controversy with his fourth novel the Satanic Verses which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker. Some Muslims considered the subject matter blasphemous and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman and the publishers of the book. Salman spent the following decade in hiding under police protection.In 2022 he was stabbed multiple times while on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. He had been invited there to talk about keeping writers safe from harm. He survived devasting injuries – including the loss of his right eye – and wrote about the attack and its aftermath in his memoir Knife.That same year he was awarded a Companion of Honour for services to literature.Salman is married to the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths and they live in New York. He has two grown up sons and two grandchildren.DISC ONE: Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed DISC TWO: Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan - Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt DISC THREE: Blowin' in the Wind - Bob Dylan DISC FOUR: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones DISC FIVE: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) - Whitney Houston DISC SIX: Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard - Paul Simon DISC SEVEN: Isn't She Lovely – Stevie Wonder DISC EIGHT: For the Love of You, Pts. 1 & 2 - The Isley Brothers BOOK CHOICE: Homer's Odyssey (Translated by Emily Wilson) LUXURY ITEM: A bed with a mosquito net CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: For the Love of You, Pts. 1 & 2 - The Isley Brothers Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

In this Write Big session of the #amwriting podcast, host Jennie Nash welcomes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jennifer Senior for a powerful conversation about finding, knowing, and claiming your voice.Jennifer shares how a medication once stripped away her ability to think in metaphor—the very heart of her writing—and what it was like to get that voice back. She and Jennie talk about how voice strengthens over time, why confidence and ruthless editing matter, and what it feels like when you're truly writing in flow.It's an inspiring reminder that your voice is your greatest strength—and worth honoring every time you sit down to write.TRANSCRIPT BELOW!THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:* Jennifer's Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross: Can't Sleep? You're Not Alone* Atlantic feature story: What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind* Atlantic feature story: The Ones We Sent Away* Atlantic feature story: It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart* The New York Times article: Happiness Won't Save You* Heavyweight the podcastSPONSORSHIP MESSAGEHey, it's Jennie Nash. And at Author Accelerator, we believe that the skills required to become a great book coach and build a successful book coaching business can be taught to people who come from all kinds of backgrounds and who bring all kinds of experiences to the work. But we also know that there are certain core characteristics that our most successful book coaches share. If you've been curious about becoming a book coach, and 2026 might be the year for you, come take our quiz to see how many of those core characteristics you have. You can find it at bookcoaches.com/characteristics-quiz.EPISODE TRANSCRIPTJennie NashHi, I'm Jennie Nash, and you're listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session, where I'm bringing you short episodes about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters. This one might not actually be that short, because today I'm talking to journalist Jennifer Senior about the idea of finding and knowing and claiming your voice—a rather big part of writing big. Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2022 and was a finalist again in 2024. Before that, she spent five years at The New York Times as both a daily book critic and a columnist for the opinion page, and nearly two decades at New York Magazine. She's also the author of a bestselling parenting book, and frequently appears on NPR and other news shows. Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for joining us.Jennifer SeniorThank you for having me. Hey, I got to clarify just one thing.Jennie NashOh, no.Jennifer SeniorAll Joy and No Fun is by no means a parenting book. I can't tell you the first thing about how to raise your kids. It is all about how kids change their parents. It's all like a sociological look at who we become and why we are—so our lives become so vexed. I like, I would do these book talks, and at the end, everybody would raise their hand and be like, “How do I get my kid into Harvard?” You know, like, the equivalent obviously—they wouldn't say it that way. I'd be like; I don't really have any idea, or how to get your kid to eat vegetables, or how to get your kid to, like, stop talking back. But anyway, I just have to clarify that, because every time...Jennie NashPlease, please—Jennifer SeniorSomeone says that, I'm like, “Noooo.” Anyway, it's a sociology book. Ah, it's an ethnography, you know. But anyway, it doesn't matter.Jennie NashAll right, like she said, you guys—not what I said.Jennifer SeniorI'm not correcting you. It came out 11 years ago. There were no iPads then, or social media. I mean, forget it. It's so dated anyway. But like, I just...Jennie NashThat's so funny. So the reason that we're speaking is that I heard you recently on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where you were talking about an Atlantic feature story that you wrote called “Why Can't Americans Sleep?” And this was obviously a reported piece, but also a really personal piece and you're talking about your futile attempts to fall asleep and the latest research into insomnia and medication and therapy that you used to treat it, and we'll link to that article and interview in the show notes. But the reason that we're talking, and that in the middle of this conversation, which—which I'm listening to and I'm riveted by—you made this comment, and it was a little bit of a throwaway comment in the conversation, and, you know, then the conversation moved on. But you talked about how you were taking a particular antidepressant you'd been prescribed, and this was the quote you said: “It blew out all the circuitry that was responsible for generating metaphors, which is what I do as a writer. So it made my writing really flat.” And I was just like, hold up. What was that like? What happened? What—everything? So that's why we're talking. So… can we go back to the very beginning? If you can remember—Jess Lahey actually told me that when she was teaching fifth and sixth grade, that's around the time that kids begin to grasp this idea of figurative language and metaphor and such. Do you remember learning how to write like that, like write in metaphor and simile and all such things?Jennifer SeniorOh, that's funny. Do I remember it? I remember them starting to sort of come unbidden in my—like they would come unbidden in my head starting maybe in my—the minute I entered college, or maybe in my teens. Actually, I had that thing where some people have this—people who become writers have, like, a narrator's voice in their head where they're actually looking at things and describing them in the third person. They're writing them as they witness the world. That went away, that narrator's voice, which I also find sort of fascinating. But, like, I would say that it sort of emerged concurrently. I guess I was scribbling a little bit of, like, short story stuff, or I tried at least one when I was a senior in high school. So that was the first time maybe that, like, I started realizing that I had a flair for it. I also—once I noticed that, I know in college I would make, you know, when I started writing for the alternative weekly and I was reviewing things, particularly theater, I would make a conscientious effort to come up with good metaphors, and, like, 50% of them worked and 50% of them didn't, because if you ever labor over a metaphor, there's a much lower chance of it working. I mean, if you come—if you revisit it and go, oh, that's not—you know, that you can tell if it's too precious. But now if I labor over a metaphor, I don't bother. I stop. You know, it has to come instantaneously or...Jennie NashOr that reminds me of people who write with the thesaurus open, like that's going to be good, right? That's not going to work. So I want to stick with this, you know, so that they come into your head, you recognize that, and just this idea of knowing, back in the day, that you could write like that—you… this was a thing you had, like you used the word “flair,” like had a flair for this. Were there other signs or things that led you to the work, like knowing you were good, or knowing when something was on the page that it was right, like, what—what is that?Jennifer SeniorIt's that feeling of exhilaration, but it's also that feeling of total bewilderment, like you've been struck by something—something just blew through you and you had nothing to do with it. I mean, it's the cliché: here I am saying the metaphors are my superpower, which my editors were telling me, and I'm about to use a cliché, which is that you feel like you're a conduit for something and you have absolutely nothing to do with it. So I would have that sense that it had almost come without conscious thought. That was sort of when I knew it was working. It's also part of being in a flow state. It's when you're losing track of time and you're just in it. And the metaphors are—yeah, they're effortless. By the way, my brain is not entirely fogged in from long COVID, but I have noticed—and at first I didn't really notice any decrements in cognition—but recently, I have. So I'm wondering now if I'm having problems with spontaneous metaphor generation. It's a little bit disconcerting. And I do feel like all SSRIs—and I'm taking one now, just because, not just because long COVID is depressing, but because I have POTS, which is like a—it's Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and that's a very common sequela from long COVID, and it wipes out your plasma serotonin. So we have to take one anyway, we POTS patients. So I found that nicotine often helped with my long COVID, which is a thing—like a nicotine patch—and that made up for it. It almost felt like I was doping [laughing]. It made my writing so much better. But it's been...Jennie NashWait, wait, wait, this is so interesting.Jennifer SeniorI know…it's really weird. I would never have guessed that so much of my writing would be dampened by Big Pharma. I mean—but now with the nicotine patches, I was like, oh, now I get why writers are smoking until into the night, writing. Like, I mean, and I always wished that I did, just because it looked cool, you know? I could have just been one of those people with their Gitanes, or however you pronounce it, but, yeah.Jennie NashWow. So I want to come—I want to circle back to this in a minute, but let's get to the first time—well, it sounds like the first time that happened where you were prescribed an antidepressant and—and you recognized that you lost the ability to write in metaphor. Can you talk about—well, first of all, can you tell us what the medication was?Jennifer SeniorYeah, it was Paxil, which is actually notorious for that. And at the top—which I only subsequently discovered—those were in the days where there were no such things as Reddit threads or anything like that. It was 1999… I guess, no, eight, but so really early. That was the bespoke antidepressant at the time, thought to be more nuanced. I think it's now fallen out of favor, because it's also a b***h to wean off of. But it was kind of awful, just—I would think, and nothing would come. It was the strangest thing. For—there's all this static electricity usually when you write, right? And there's a lot of free associating that goes on that, again, feels a little involuntary. You know, you start thinking—it's like you've pulled back the spring in the pinball machine, and suddenly the thing is just bouncing around everywhere, and the ball wasn't bouncing around. Nothing was lighting up. It was like a dis… it just was strange, to be able to summon nothing.Jennie NashWow. So you—you just used this killer metaphor to describe that.Jennifer SeniorYeah, that was spontaneous.Jennie NashRight? So—so you said first, you said static, static energy, which—which is interesting.Jennifer SeniorYeah, it's... [buzzing sound]Jennie NashYeah. Yeah. Because it's noisy. You're talking about...Jennie SeniorOh, but it's not disruptive noise. Sorry, that might seem like it's like unwanted crackling, like on your television. I didn't really—yeah, maybe that's the wrong metaphor, actually, maybe the pinball is sort of better, that all you need is to, you know, psych yourself up, sit down, have your caffeine, and then bam, you know? But I didn't mean static in that way.Jennie NashI understood what you meant. There's like a buzzy energy.Jennifer SeniorYeah, right. It's fizz.Jennie NashFizz... that's so good. So you—you recognized that this was gone.Jennifer SeniorSo gone! Like the TV was off, you know?Jennie NashAnd did you...?Jennifer SeniorOr the machine, you know, was unplugged? I mean, it's—Jennie NashYeah, and did you? I'm just so curious about the part of your brain that was watching another part of your brain.Jennifer Senior[Laughing] You know what? I think... oh, that's really interesting. But are you watching, or are you just despairing because there's nothing—I mean, I'm trying to think if that's the right...Jennie NashBut there's a part of your brain that's like, this part of my brain isn't working.Jennifer SeniorRight. I'm just thinking how much metacognition is involved in— I mean, if you forget a word, are you really, like, staring at that very hard, or are you just like, s**t, what's the word? If you're staring at Jack Nicholson on TV, and you're like, why can't I remember that dude's name?Multiple speakers[Both laughing]Jennifer SeniorWhich happens to me far more regularly now, [unintelligible]… than it used to, you know? I mean, I don't know. There is a part of you that's completely alarmed, but, like, I guess you're right. There did come a point where I—you're right, where I suddenly realized, oh, there's just been a total breakdown here. It's never happening. Like, what is going on? Also, you know what would happen? Every sentence was a grind, like...Jennie NashOkay, so—okay, so...Jennifer Senior[Unintelligible]... Why is this so effortful? When you can't hold the previous sentence in your head, suddenly there's been this lapse in voice, right? Because, like, if every sentence is an effort and you're starting from nothing again, there's no continuity in how you sound. So, I mean, it was really dreadful. And by the way, if I can just say one thing, sorry now that—Jennie NashNo, I love it!Jennifer SeniorYeah. Sorry. I'm just—now you really got me going. I'm just like, yeah, I know. I'm sort of on a tear and a partial rant, which is Prozac—there came a point where, like, every single SSRI was too activating for me to sleep. But it was, of course, a problem, because being sleepless makes you depressed, so you need something to get at your depression. And SNRIs, like the Effexor's and the Cymbalta's, are out of the question, because those are known to be activating. So I kept vainly searching for SSRIs, and Prozac was the only one that didn't—that wound up not being terribly activating, besides Paxil, but it, too, was somewhat deadening, and I wrote my whole book on it.Jennie NashWow!Jennifer SeniorIt's not all metaphor.Multiple Speakers[both laughing]Jennifer SeniorIt's not all me and no—nothing memorable, you know? I mean, it's—it's kind of a problem. It was—I can't really bear to go back and look at it.Jennie NashWow.Jennie NashSo—so the feeling...Jennifer SeniorI'm really giving my book the hard sell, like it's really a B plus in terms of its pro…—I mean, you know, it wasn't.Jennie NashSo you—you—you recognize its happening, and what you recognize is a lack of fizzy, buzzy energy and a lack of flow. So I just have to ask now, presumably—well, there's long COVID now, but when you don't have—when you're writing in your full powers, do you—is it always in a state of flow? Like, if you're not in a state of flow, do you get up and go do something else? Like, what—how does that function in the life of a writer on a deadline?Jennifer SeniorOK. Well, am I always in a state of flow? No! I mean, flow is not—I don't know anyone who's good at something who just immediately can be in flow every time.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorIt's still magic when it happens. You know, when I was in flow almost out of the gate every day—the McIlvaine stories—like, I knew when I hit send, this thing is damn good. I knew when I hit send on a piece that was not as well read, but is like my second or third favorite story. I wrote something for The New York Times called “Happiness Wont Save You,” about a pioneer in—he wrote one of the foundational studies in positive psychology about lottery winners and paraplegics, and how lottery winners are pretty much no happier than random controls found in a phone book, and paraplegics are much less unhappy than you might think, compared to controls. It was really poorly designed. It would never withstand the scrutiny of peer review today. But anyway, this guy was, like, a very innovative thinker. His name was Philip Brickman, and in 1982 at 38 years old, he climbed—he got—went—he found his way to the roof of the tallest building in Ann Arbor and jumped, and took his own life. And I was in flow pretty much throughout writing that one too.Jennie NashWow. So the piece you're referring to, that you referred to previous to that, is What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind, which was a feature story in The Atlantic. It's the one you won the—Pul…Pulitzer for? It's now made into a book. It has, like...Jennifer SeniorAlthough all it is like, you know, the story between...Jennie NashCovers, right?Jennifer SeniorYeah. Yeah. Because—yeah, yeah.Jennie NashBut—Jennifer SeniorWhich is great, because then people can have it, rather than look at it online, which—and it goes on forever—so yeah.Jennie NashSo this is a piece—the subtitle is Grief, Conspiracy Theories, and One Family's Search for Meaning in the Two Decades Since 9/11—and I actually pulled a couple of metaphors from that piece, because I re-read it knowing I was going to speak to you… and I mean, it was just so beautifully written. It's—it's so beautifully structured, everything, everything. But here's a couple of examples for our listeners. You're describing Bobby, who was a 26-year-old who died in 9/11, who was your brother's college roommate.Jennifer SeniorAnd at that young adult—they—you can't afford New York. They were living together for eight years. It was four in college, and four—Jennie NashWow.Jennifer SeniorIn New York City. They had a two-bedroom... yeah, in a cheaper part... well, to the extent that there are cheaper parts in...Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorThe way over near York Avenue, east side, yeah.Jennie NashSo you write, “When he smiled, it looked for all the world like he'd swallowed the moon.” And you wrote, “But for all Bobby's hunger and swagger, what he mainly exuded, even during his college years, was warmth, decency, a corkscrew quirkiness.” So just that kind of language—a corkscrew quirkiness, like he'd swallowed the moon—that, it's that the piece is full of that. So that's interesting, that you felt in flow with this other piece you described and this one. So how would you describe—so you describe metaphors as things that just come—it just—it just happens. You're not forcing it—you can't force it. Do you think that's true of whatever this ineffable thing of voice—voices—as well?Jennifer SeniorOh, that's a good question. My voice got more distinct as I got older—it gets better. I think a lot of people's—writers'—powers wax. Philip Roth is a great example of that. Colette? I mean, there are people whose powers really get better and better, and I've gotten better with more experience. But do you start with the voice? I think you do. I don't know if you can teach someone a voice.Jennie NashSo when you say you've gotten better, what does that mean to you?Jennifer SeniorYeah. Um, I'm trying to think, like, do I write with more swing? Do I—just with more confidence because I'm older? Being a columnist…which is the least creative medium…Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorSeven hundred and fifty words to fit onto—I had a dedicated space in print. When David Leonhardt left, I took over the Monday spot, during COVID. So it's really, really—but what it forces you to do is to be very—your writing becomes lean, and it becomes—and structure is everything. So this does not relate to voice, but my—I was always pretty good at structure anyway. I think if you—I think movies and radio, podcasts, are, like, great for structure. Storytelling podcasts are the best thing to—I think I unconsciously emulate them. The McIlvaine story has a three-act structure. There's also—I think the podcast Heavyweight is sublime in that way.Jennie NashIs that Roxane Gay?Jennifer SeniorNo, no, no, no.Jennie NashOh, it's, um—Jennifer SeniorIt's Jonathan Goldstein.Jennie NashYes, got it. I'm going to write that down and link to that in our show notes.Jennifer SeniorIt's... I'm trying to think of—because, you know, his is, like, narratives, and it's—it's got a very unusual premise. But voice, voice, voice—well, I, you know, I worked on making my metaphors better in the beginning. I worked on noticing things, you know, and I worked on—I have the—I'm the least visual person alive. I mean, this is what's so interesting. Like, I failed to notice once that I had sat for an hour and a half with a woman who was missing an arm. I mean, I came back to the office and was talking—this is Barbara Epstein, who was a storied editor of The New York Review of Books, the story editor, along with Bob Silver. And I was talking to Mike Tomasky, who was our, like, city politic editor at the time. And I said to him, I just had this one—I knew she knew her. And he said, was it awkward? Was—you know, with her having one arm and everything? And I just stared at him and went one arm? I—I am really oblivious to stuff. And yet visual metaphors are no problem with me. Riddle me that, Batman. I don't know why that is. But I can, like, summon them in my head, and so I worked at it for a while, when my editors were responsive to it. Now they come more easily, so that seems to maybe just be a facility. I started noticing them in other people's writing. So Michael Ondaatje —in, I think it was In the Skin of a Lion, but maybe it was The English Patient. I've read, like, every book of his, like I've, you know— Running… was it Running in the Family? Running with the Family? I think it was Running in the—his memoir. And, I mean, doesn't—everything. Anil's Ghost—he— you know, that was it The Ballad of Billy the Kid? [The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] Anyway, I can go on and on. He had one metaphor talking about the evening being as serene as ink. And it was then that I realized that metaphors without effort often—and—or is that a simile? That's a simile.Jennie NashLike—or if it's “like” or “as,” it's a simile.Jennifer SeniorYeah. So I'm pretty good with similes, maybe more than metaphors. But... serene as ink. I realized that what made that work is that ink is one syllable. There is something about landing on a word with one syllable that sounds like you did not work particularly hard at it. You just look at it and keep going. And I know that I made a real effort to make my metaphors do that for a while, and I still do sometimes. Anything more than that can seem labored.Jennie NashOh, but that's so interesting. So you—you noticed in other people what worked and what you liked, and then tried to fold that into your own work.Jennifer SeniorYeah.Jennie NashSo does that mean you might noodle on—like, you have the structure of the metaphor or simile, but you might noodle on the word—Jennifer SeniorThe final word?Jennie NashThe final word.Jennifer SeniorYeah. Yeah, the actual simile, or whatever—yeah, I guess it's a simile—yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they—like I said, they come unbidden. I think I have enough experience now—which may make my voice better—to know what's crap. And I also, by the way, I'll tell you what makes your voice better: just being very willing to hit Select Alt, Delete. You know, there's more where that came from. I am a monster of self-editing. I just—I have no problem doing it. I like to do it. I like to be told when things are s**t. I think that improves your voice, because you can see it on the page.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorAnd also, I think paying attention to other people's writing, you know, I did more and more of that, you know, reverse engineering stuff, looking at how they did stuff as I got older, so...Jennie NashSo I was going to ask a question, which now maybe you already answered, but the question was going to be… you said that you're—you feel like you're getting better as a writer as you got older. And you—you said that was due to experience. And I was going to ask, is it, or is it due to getting older? You know, is there something about literally living more years that makes you better, or, you know, like, is wisdom something that you just get, or is it something you work for? But I think what I'm hearing is you're saying you have worked to become the kind of writer who knows, you know, what you just said—you delete stuff, it comes again. But tell me if—you know, you welcome the kind of tough feedback, because you know that makes you better. You know, this sort of real effort to become better, it sounds like that's a practice you have. Is that—is that right?Jennifer SeniorOh yeah. I mean, well, let's do two things on that, please. I so easily lose my juju these days that, like, you've got to—if you can put a, you know, oh God, I'm going to use a cliché again—if you can put a pin in or bookmark that, the observation about, you know, harsh feedback. I want to come back to that. But yes, one of the things that I was going to keep—when I said that I have the confidence now, I also was going to say that I have the wisdom, but I had too many kind of competing—Jennie NashYeah. Yeah.Jennifer SeniorYou know, were running at once, and I, you know, many trains on many tracks—Jennie NashYeah, yeah.Jennifer Senior…about to leave, so…, Like, I had to sort of hop on one. But, like, the—the confidence and wisdom, yes, and also, like, I'll tell you something: in the McIlvaine piece, it may have been the first time I did, like, a narrative nonfiction. I told a story. There was a time when I would have hid behind research on that one.Jennie NashOoh, and did you tell a story. It was the—I remember reading that piece when it first came out, and there you're introducing, you know, this—the situation. And then there's a moment, and it comes very quickly at the top of the piece, where you explain your relationship to the protagonist of the story. And there's a—there's just a moment of like, oh, we're—we're really in something different here. There's really—is that feel of, this is not a reported story, this is a lived story, and that there's so many layers of power, I mean, to the story itself, but obviously the way that you—you present it, so I know exactly what you're talking about.Jennifer SeniorYeah, and by the way, I think writing in the first person, which I've been doing a lot of lately, is not something I would have done until now. Probably because I am older and I feel like I've earned it. I have more to say. I've been through more stuff. It's not, like, with the same kind of narcissism or adolescent—like, I want to get this out, you know. It's more searching, I think, and because I've seen more, and also because I've had these pent up stories that I've wanted to tell for a long time. And also I just don't think I would have had the balls, you know.Jennie NashRight.Jennifer SeniorSo some of it is—and I think that that's part of—you can write better in your own voice. If it's you writing about you, you're—there's no better authority, you know? So your voice comes out.Jennie NashRight.Jennifer SeniorBut I'm trying to think of also—I would have hid behind research and talked about theories of grief. And when I wrote, “It's the damnedest thing, the dead abandon you, and then you abandon the dead,” I had blurted that out loud when I was talking to, actually, not Bobby's brother, which is the context in which I wrote it, but to Bobby's—I said that, it's, like, right there on the tape—to his former almost fiancée. And I was thinking about that line, that I let it stand. I didn't actually then rush off and see if there was a body of literature that talked about the guilt that the living feel about letting go of their memories. But I would have done that at one point. I would have turned it into this... because I was too afraid to just let my own observations stand. But you get older and you're like, you know what? I'm smart enough to just let that be mine. Like, assume...Jennie NashRight.Jennifer SeniorIt's got to be right. But can we go back, also, before I forget?Jennie NashYeah, we're going to go back to harsh, but—but I would just want to use your cliché, put a pin in what you said, because you've said so many important things— that there's actual practice of getting better, and then there's also wisdom of—of just owning, growing into, embracing, which are two different things, both so important. So I just wanted to highlight that you've gone through those two things. So yes, let's go back to—I said harsh, and maybe I miss—can...misrepresenting what you meant.Jennifer SeniorYou may not have said that. I don't know what you said.Jennie NashNo, I did, I did.Jennifer SeniorYou did, okay, yeah, because I just know that it was processed as a harsh—oh no, totally. Like, I was going to say to you that—so there was a part of my book, my book, eventually, I just gave one chapter to each person in my life whom I thought could, like, assess it best, and one of them, so this friend—I did it on paper. He circled three paragraphs, and he wrote, and I quote, “Is this just a shitty way of saying...?” And then I was like, thank God someone caught it, if it was shitty. Oh my God. And then—and I was totally old enough to handle it, you know, I was like 44, whatever, 43. And then, who was it? Someone else—oh, I think I gave my husband the intro, and he wrote—he circled a paragraph and just wrote, “Ugh.” Okay, Select Alt, Delete, redo. You know, like, what are you going to do with that? That's so unambiguous. It's like, you know—and also, I mean, when you're younger, you argue. When you're older, you never quarrel with Ugh. Or Is this...Jennie NashRight, you're just like, okay, yep.Jennifer SeniorYeah. And again, you—you've done it enough that, you know, there's so much more where that came from.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorWhy cling to anything that someone just, I don't know, had this totally allergic reaction to? Like, you know, if my husband broke out in a hive.Jennie NashYeah. So, circling back to the—the storyline of—you took this medication, you lost your ability to write in this way, you changed medications, presumably, you got it back. What did it feel like to get it back? Did you—do you remember that?Jennifer SeniorOh God, yes, it was glorious.Jennie NashReally?!Jennifer SeniorOh, you don't feel like yourself. I think that—I mean, I think there are many professions that are intertwined with identity. They may be the more professional—I'm sorry, the more creative professions. But not always, you know. And so if your writing voice is gone, and it's—I mean, so much of writing is an expression of your interior, if not life, then, I don't know some kind of thought process and something that you're working out. To have that drained out of you, for someone to just decant all the life out of your—or something to decant all the life out of your writing, it's—it's, I wouldn't say it's traumatic, that's totally overstating it, but it's—it's a huge bummer. It's, you know, it's depressing.Jennie NashWell, the word glorious, that's so cool. So to feel that you got back your—the you-ness of your voice was—was glorious. I mean, that's—that's amazing.Jennifer SeniorWhat—if I can just say, I wrote a feature, right, that then, like, I remember coming off of it, and then I wrote a feature that won the News Women's Club of New York story for best feature that year. Like, I didn't realize that those are kind of hard to win, and not like I won... I think I've won one since. But, like, that was in, like, 99 or something. I mean, like, you know, I don't write a whole lot of things that win stuff, until recently, you know. There was, like, a real kind of blackout period where, you know, I mean, but like—which I think, it probably didn't have to do with the quality of my writing. I mean, there was—but, I mean, you know, I wasn't writing any of the stuff that floated to the tippy top, and, like, I think that there was some kind of explosion thereof, like, all the, again, stuff that was just desperate to come out. I think there was just this volcanic outpouring.Jennie NashSo you're saying now you are winning things, which is indeed true. I mean, Pulitzer Prizes among them. Do you think that that has to do with this getting better? The wisdom, the practice, the glorious having of your abilities? Or, I guess what I'm asking is, like, is luck a part of—a part of all that? Is it just, it just happens? Or do you think there's some reason that it's happening? You feel that your writing is that powerful now?Jennifer SeniorWell, luck is definitely a part of it, because The Atlantic is the greatest place to showcase your feature writing. It gets so much attention, even though I think fewer people probably read that piece about Bobby McIlvaine than would have read any of my columns on any given day. The kind of attention was just so different. And it makes sense in a funny way, because it was 13,600 words or something. I mean, it was so long, and columns are 750 words. But, like, I think that I just lucked out in terms of the showcase. So that's definitely a part of it. And The Atlantic has the machinery to, you know, and all these dedicated, wonderful publicity people who will make it possible for people to read it, blah, blah, blah. So there's that. If you're older, you know everyone in the business, so you have people amplifying your work, they're suddenly reading it and saying, hey, everybody read it. It was before Twitter turned to garbage. Media was still a way to amplify it. It's much harder now, so passing things along through social media has become a real problem. But at that moment, it was not—Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorSo that was totally luck. Also, I wonder if it was because I was suddenly writing something from in the first person, and my voice was just better that way. And I wouldn't have had, like, the courage, you know?Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorAnd also, you're a book critic, which is what I was at The Times. And you certainly are not writing from the first person. And as a columnist, you're not either.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorSo, you know, those are very kind of constricted forms, and they're also not—there are certainly critics who win Pulitzers. I don't think I was good enough at it. I was good, but it was not good enough. I could name off the top of my head, like, so many critics who were—who are—who haven't even won anything yet. Like Dwight Garner really deserves one. Why has he not won a Pulitzer? He's, I think, the best writer—him and Sophie Gilbert, who keeps coming close. I don't get it, like, what the hell?Jennie NashDo you—as a—as a reader of other people's work, I know you—you mentioned Michael Ondaatje that you'd studied—study him. But do you just recognize when somebody else is on their game? Like, do you recognize the voice or the gloriousness of somebody else's work? Can you just be like, yeah, that...?Jennifer SeniorWell, Philip Roth, sentence for sentence. Martin Amis, even more so—I cannot get over the originality of each of his sentences and the wide vocabulary from which he recruits his words, and, like, maybe some of that is just being English. I think they just get better, kind of more comprehensive. They read more comprehensively. And I always tell people, if they want to improve their voice, they should read the Victorians, like that [unintelligible]. His also facility with metaphor, I don't think, is without equal. The thing is, I can't stand his fiction. I just find it repellent. But his criticism is bangers and his memoirs are great, so I love them.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorSo I really—I read him very attentively, trying to think of, like, other people whose kind of...Jennie NashI guess I was—I was getting at more... like, genius recognizes genius, that con... that concept, like, when you know you can do this and write in this way from time to time anyway, you can pull it off.Jennifer SeniorYeah, genius as in—I wouldn't—we can't go there.Jennie NashWell, that's the—that's the cliché, right? But, like...Jennifer SeniorOh no, I know, I know. Game—game, game recognizes game.Jennie NashGame recognizes game is a better way of saying it. Like, do you see—that's actually what the phrase is. I don't know where I came up with genius, but...Jennifer SeniorNo, it's fine. You can stick anything in that template, you know—evil recognizes evil, I mean, you know, it's like a...Jennie NashYeah. Do you see it? Do you see it? Like, you can see it in other people?Jennifer SeniorSure. Oh yeah, I see it.Jennie NashYeah.Jennifer SeniorI mean, you're just talking about among my contemporaries, or just as it...Jennie NashJust like anything, like when you pick up a book or you read an article or even listen to a storytelling pack podcast, that sense of being in the hands of somebody who's on it.Jennifer SeniorYeah, I think that Jonathan Goldstein—I mean, I think that the—the Heavyweight Podcast, for sure, is something—and more than that, it's—it's storytelling structure, it's just that—I think that anybody who's a master at structure would just look at that show and be like, yeah, that show nails it each and every time.Jennie NashI've not listened, but I feel like I should end our time together. I would talk to you forever about this, but I always like to leave our listeners with something specific to reflect or practice or do. And is there anything related to metaphor or practicing, finding your voice, owning your voice, that you would suggest for—for folks? You've already suggested a lot.Jennifer SeniorRead the Victorians.Jennie NashAwesome. Any particular one that you would say start with?Jennifer SeniorYeah, you know what? I find Dickens rough sledding. I like his, you know, dear friend Wilkie Collins. I think No Name is one of the greatest books ever. I would read No Name.Jennie NashAmazing. And I will add, go read Jennifer's work. We'll link to a bunch of it in the show notes. Study her and—and watch what she does and learn what she does—that there it is, a master at work, and that's what I would suggest. So thank you for joining us and having this amazing discussion.Jennifer SeniorThis has been super fun.Jennie NashAnd for our listeners, until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.NarratorThe Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by debut author Leon Craig to talk about her novel The Decadence – a story of millennial debauchery in a haunted house which uses a knowing patchwork of literary influences from Boccaccio and Shirley Jackson to Martin Amis and Mark Z. Danielewski to make an old form fresh. She discusses how and why it took her so long to write, how she first acquired a taste for the gothic, and why she thinks the horror novel, that seeming relic of the 1970s, is making such a dramatic comeback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Notes and Links to Kurt Baumeister's Work   Kurt Baumeister's writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, and is a member of The National Book Critics Circle and The Authors Guild. Twilight of the Gods is his second novel. Buy Twilight of the Gods   Kurt's Website   Chicago Review of Books Interview Re: Twilight of the Gods  At about 2:45, Kurt talks about the book's original publication date falling around the 2024 elections At about 6:15, Kurt reflects on the vagaries of publishing, and interesting and complimentary feedback from readers on the book At about 11:30, Pete shares a wonderful quote about Kurt's writing, and Kurt discusses Martin Amis and other influences on his writing At about 15:45, The two discuss the book's “Dramatis Personae” to start the book and some tongue-in-cheek descriptions of some Norse gods At about 17:30, Kurt responds to Pete's questions about Loki's historical and mythical evolutions At about 20:30, Kurt reflects on metafiction and gives background on why he names a main character in the book “Kurt” At about 23:50, Kurt talks about media representations of Loki in connection to his own At about 25:30, Kurt describes why he makes Loki as he is  At about 28:20, Kurt gives background on the Norns, of which Sunshine/Sabrina from the book is a member At about 29:30, Pete compliments the ways the book traces human history, particularly with regard to Hitler's rise  At about 34:15, Kurt responds to Pete's question about mixing fiction and fact At about 37:00, Kurt talks about history repeating itself and connecting disparate eras  At about 39:55, Kurt responds to Pete's question about the subtleties and the nuances of the book, i.e, plot focus v. allegory focus At about 42:00, Kurt discusses his mindset in writing the ending(s) of the book At about 45:00, An intriguing question posed in the book about fate is probed At about 45:50, Pete cites the book's ending as highly successful, and Kurt shouts out a shared beloved movie, Training Day, with regard to slowly-creeping evil  At about 47:50, a “reverence and pity” for artists is discussed, as mentioned in the book   You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow Pete on IG, where he is @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where he is @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both the YouTube Channel and the podcast while you're checking out this episode.       Pete is very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. His conversation with Hannah Pittard, a recent guest, is up at Chicago Review.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl      Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting Pete's one-man show, DIY podcast and extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This month's Patreon bonus episode features an exploration of flawed characters, protagonists who are too real in their actions, and horror and noir as being where so much good and realistic writing takes place. Pete has added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show.     This is a passion project, a DIY operation, and Pete would love for your help in promoting what he's convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 312 with Amber Sparks, the author of the short story collections And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Slate, and elsewhere. Her book, Happy People Don't Live Here, was published in October 2025. The episode drops on November 25, today. Please go to ceasefiretoday.org, and/or https://act.uscpr.org/a/letaidin to call your congresspeople and demand an end to the forced famine and destruction of Gaza and the Gazan people.

On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by debut author Leon Craig to talk about her novel The Decadence – a story of millennial debauchery in a haunted house which uses a knowing patchwork of literary influences from Boccaccio and Shirley Jackson to Martin Amis and Mark Z. Danielewski to make an old form fresh. She discusses how and why it took her so long to write, how she first acquired a taste for the gothic, and why she thinks the horror novel, that seeming relic of the 1970s, is making such a dramatic comeback.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dame Rose Tremain is one of Britain's most prolific and popular writers, having written 17 novels and five collections of short stories over the last 50 years. She was one of only six women on Granta magazine's inaugural 1982 list of the best young British novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and others. Her fifth novel Restoration was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989, she won the Whitbread Prize for Music And Silence in 1999, and was awarded the 2008 Orange Prize - the precursor to the Women's Prize for Fiction - for her novel The Road Home. Having already been made a CBE in 2007, she became Dame Rose Tremain in 2020 for services to writing. Her most recent work is a short story called The Toy Car.Rose Tremain tells John Wilson how her father, a largely unsuccessful playwright called Keith Thomson, inspired her childhood interest in storytelling, although he never encouraged her to write. She recalls how she first started writing fiction to help her cope with loneliness in a household where there was little parental affection. Rose recalls how it was a teacher at her boarding school who first recognised her ability and encouraged her to apply for an Oxbridge university place, only to be dissuaded by her mother, who sent her to a finishing school in France instead. She credits the novelist Angus Wilson, one of her English Literature tutors at the University Of East Anglia, for giving her the confidence to write her first novel. She also chooses The Diary Of Samuel Pepys as a major inspiration on her 1989 Booker-shortlisted novel Restoration, which was later turned into a Hollywood film starring Robert Downey Jnr. and Meg Ryan.Producer: Edwina Pitman

I've anticipated this interview for 6 years. Robyn Davidson has lived one of the most mythologised lives in Australian memory.She famously and unintentionally burst onto the scene with Tracks in 1988, which was a 2,700km camel trek across the Simpson desert. She'd never intended to write a book or document anything of it's kind from the journey, but was desperate for some money to gather supplies for the impending trip. She figured $1000 would do, and serendipitously met the National Geographic photographer who put her on the map whilst cleaning windows as a part time gig in Alice Springs. He said that if she wrote to National Geographic telling them about the journey, then she might get what she needed.They paid her $4,000 which Robyn comments 'was a fortune', and from there, the rest is history.Robyn has since lived between India, London and Australia but travelled most elsewhere on the map. She was with Salman Rushdie while he wrote the 'Satanic Verses', has published a series of books and articles documenting the lives of nomads, lived an 'aristocratic life' with her partner Narendra Singh Bhati in the high Himalayas and most recently published an autobiography titled 'Unfinished Woman'. Robyn say's to me that 'memoir is the slipperiest genre'.I have waited 6 years to do this interview with Robyn. She has a dream guest of mine since before the podcast began. We recorded earlier this year in rural Victoria. The interview is Robyn's life. What led up to tracks, and what happened after. Robyn reflects on her lifelong resistance to labels. Not a “writer,” not a “traveller,” not a “feminist icon,” but simply, as she says, “a person.” We speak about memoir, the slipperiness of memory “in retrospect, memory is imagination”.She speaks candidly about solitude, beauty, and depression, her family, fame, about the distortion of the famous photographs “Rick made me look like a Vogue model, that wasn't me”, and her uneasy relationship with literary celebrity in London alongside Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and more.“Whenever you write in the first person, you are necessarily creating a character — a doppelgänger. She is me, but she's not quite me.”“The truth is, memory is imagination.”“I worship the phrase ‘I don't know.' If you don't have ‘I don't know,' you can't learn anything.”“If you have a firm identity, you're trapped in it.”In this podcast you can expect the following discussion. The Performed Self & Identity“Whenever you use the first-person pronoun, you are necessarily creating a character.”The Narrative Fallacy“We invent neat, linear, emotionally satisfying stories to explain what happened… but the world is messy, chaotic and driven by chance.”Freedom, Nomadism & Refusal to Be FixedFreedom and movement — literal and intellectual — define her resistance to labels like “travel writer” or “author.”Chance, Fate & Serendipity“On the tiniest turning point you can head off in a billion directions.”Depression, Nihilism & Meaning“It's a terrible pain that hovers somewhere between the physical body and the mental body.”“To learn how to deal with a profoundly nihilistic view and to counter that view — that's been the most formative moment of my life.”Beauty, Objectification & Subjecthood“If that journey was about anything, it was about being the subject of my own life, not an object.”Feminism, Rebellion & the 1968 GenerationThe spirit of the late-'60s counterculture — radical freedom, equality, and experimentation — shaped her worldview.Authenticity vs. Fame“What I was interested in was knowledge and whether people were genuine or

Sir Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most acclaimed novelists, a Booker prize winner with a career spanning five decades with work that often explores morality, memory, and the intersections of private lives with public events. Sir Ian has long been associated with contemporaries like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie, who together reshaped the British novel from the 1980s onward. In this episode of Ways to Change the World, he spoke to Krishnan Guru-Murthy about the great issues facing the world from artificial intelligence to the rise of authoritarianism - as well as his latest novel What We Can Know.

This episode takes Jack Aldane to Manchester, where he meets two men who knew Martin Amis in a rather unique setting. Ian McGuire and John McAuliffe, both esteemed authors, are the co-founders of The Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.Not long after establishing this bastion of new literary talent in 2007, the pair began the search for ambassadors to endorse its mission and teach new entrants. In 2006-2007, Martin Amis joined as Iconic Professor of Creative Writing. He was followed in 2011-2012 by Colm Tóibín, who in turn was followed by Jeanette Winterson, who has filled the role since 2013. More recently, the centre has enjoyed the employment of Emma Clarke and Tim Price on its new screenwriting modules. As its website explains, the centre teaches people "how to write novels, short stories, poems, plays and screenplays", helping students "to read as a writer reads, offer seminars on form and theory, and on contemporary publishing".Ian and John recount their fondest, funniest memories of working alongside Amis, as well as the political climate after 9/11 that made him more of a political figure than he'd ever been before.This conversation captures an altogether different look at who Amis was. This is Martin Amis not so much performing for an audience as seeking to impart the best of what he knew to a new generation of writers. This was, as John describes, an "avuncular" Amis, then in his 50s and early 60s, still game for a pint down the local with his students, and with arguably some of his best work still ahead.And then there was Amis's surprising grasp of the 5 principles of Pilates. If you want understand what that's about, you know what to do.FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamisFIND US ON YOUTUBE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian isn't your average campus novel. Emily joins us to talk about writing comedy, marriage plots, reading classics and more. The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya is a gripping tale of complex family mythologies. Jo joins us to talk about writing dialogue, literary influences, story structure, separating art from the artist, characterization and more. Listen in as these authors speak separately with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.        Featured Books (Episode): Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian Vladimir by Julia May Jonas The Wife by Meg Wolitzer The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden The Bostonians by Henry James The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya Three Rooms by Jo Hamya The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

Every Wednesday and Friday in August we will publish some of our favourite audio long reads of 2025, in case you missed them, with an introduction from the editorial team to explain why we've chosen it. This week, from March: over 50 years, she has become one of the most revered writers in Australia. Is she finally going to get worldwide recognition? By Sophie Elmhirst. Read by Nicolette Chin. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

"The writer has to have patience, the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out. And if that's not worth doing," Leonard said, "then he doesn't want to write." Leonard wanted to write from a young age, and write he did, first producing western stories and western novels before moving toward the crime novels that made his reputation. His is the career of a working writer the likes we don't see much of anymore. About COOLER THAN COOL, Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Barry writes that "If you love Elmore Leonard-and who doesn't?-you'll love this fascinating, richly detailed account of how one of our greatest storytellers lived his life and learned his craft."Over the course of his sixty-year career, Elmore Leonard published forty-five novels that had enduring appeal to readers around the world. Revered by other writers such as Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, and Stephen King, his books were innovative in their blending of a Hemingway-inspired noirish minimalism and masterful use of dialogue over exposition-a direct evolution spurred by his years as a screenwriter.When C. M. Kushins was fifteen he worked up his courage and wrote a fan letter to Elmore and included one of his own short stories. Elmore proofread it and wrote an encouraging letter back. Years later, Kushins finally got a short story published and Elmore sent him a congratulatory note. When he first started thinking about writing this book, Kushins went nosing around the University of South Carolina archives-and found his own letters going back to when he was fifteen. Elmore had saved all their correspondence. It was this story that helped him get the Leonard family on board with the book. Indeed, the Leonard family has fully participated, contributing original interviews, additional personal correspondence, exclusive photographs, as well as access to Leonard's unfinished final novel. The biography also includes unpublished, loose memoir excerpts. These are included here for the first time to illuminate key passages of importance throughout Leonard's life in his own words.Leonard's fiction contained many layers, and at the heart of his work were progressive themes, stemming from his years as a student of the Jesuit religious order, his personal beliefs in social justice, and his successful battle over alcoholism. He drew inspiration from greats like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the true motivation and brilliance behind his crime writing was the ongoing class struggle to achieve the American Dream-often seen through the eyes of law enforcement officers and the criminals they vowed to apprehend.COOLER THAN COOL is not just a biography for fans of Leonard's fiction. His is work was also the source material for many movies including 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Out of Sight-as well as the TV series Justified-and influenced American filmmaking, especially the western and crime genres.Definitive and revealing, COOLER THAN COOL shows Leonard emerging as one of the last writers of the "pulp fiction" era of midcentury America, to ultimately become one of the most successful storytellers of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to have far-reaching effects on both contemporary crime fiction and American filmmaking.One more thing: 2025 also marks Elmore Leonard's centennial. In September, Mariner Books will bring a never-published novella by the author, Picket Line, with an introduction by Kushins, timed to Leonard's October birthday.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

En este segundo episodio del especial sobre los años 80, Ricardo y Alejandro se adentran en la década desde su faceta más vibrante: la música, el cine, la literatura y la cultura popular.Fue la era dorada del videoclip, con Michael Jackson marcando un antes y un después, mientras Madonna, Prince y Whitney Houston definían el sonido y la estética pop de la época. En Colombia la hegemonía cultural gringa convivía, y a veces competía, con lo local: el vallenato vivía su propio auge con Diomedes Díaz y el Binomio de Oro.En el cine, E.T., Blade Runner o The Breakfast Club se convirtieron en símbolos, mientras en Colombia títulos como El embajador de la India o las comedias del Gordo Benjumea, como El taxista millonario, conectaban con el público. La literatura tuvo nombres que marcaron época, desde García Márquez y Vallejo hasta Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Paul Auster y Stephen King.Fue también la década en que los videojuegos llegaron para quedarse, con Space Invaders, Pac-Man y las máquinas de arcade en lugares como Unicentro en Bogotá.Consigue El arte de no enloquecer aquí: https://www.librerianacional.com/el-arte-de-no-enloquecer/p?srsltid=AfmBOoosXMUOGj46ViZSS16nyw97thP2kVFEEHdkmVCjqc1Ml2A3Je75. Toma Ficcionario, el audiotaller de escritura con Ricardo Silva Romero: https://ellocutorio.com/ficcionario

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Nicola Barker, talking about her new book TonyInterruptor -- about how a man who interrupts a free jazz concert becomes a viral sensation on social media. Nicola tells Sam why some of her books are bouts of the flu and some are sneezes, how hard she works on her apparently spontaneous prose, why she remains devoted to reality television — and about the time she went to visit Martin Amis with a ghetto blaster.    

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Nicola Barker, talking about her new book TonyInterruptor -- about how a man who interrupts a free jazz concert becomes a viral sensation on social media. Nicola tells Sam why some of her books are bouts of the flu and some are sneezes, how hard she works on her apparently spontaneous prose, why she remains devoted to reality television — and about the time she went to visit Martin Amis with a ghetto blaster.    Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comTom is a novelist, essayist, and critic, who once described himself as a “supposed literary intellectual/homosexual/Republican.” He's the former literary editor of GQ and a professor emeritus of English at GW. He's the author of 11 books of fiction, including Up With the Sun, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers — which was adapted into a miniseries. His nonfiction has focused on plagiarism (Stolen Words), letters (Yours Ever), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage). His new book is The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994.For two clips of our convo — on the “mixed marriages” of the AIDS crisis, and Hitchens before cancel culture — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: his struggling middle-class family on Long Island; his dad a WWII vet; neither parent finished high school — and Tom went to Harvard for his PhD; the Space Race; when you could make a good living as a freelance writer; novelist Mary McCarthy as a formative influence; Capote; Vidal; Mailer; Updike; Orwell and clarity in writing; the Danish cartoonists; the Jacob Epstein plagiarism scandal; Martin Amis; Elizabeth Hardwick; Tom's conservatism; the New Deal as a buffer against socialism; the anti-Communism of Catholics; Bobby Kennedy; leftist utopianism on campus; Bill Buckley; AIDS bringing America out of the closet; losing a boyfriend to the disease; the fear of an HIV test; the medieval symptoms; the deadly perils of dating; the dark humor; writing Virtually Normal thinking I would die; the miracle drugs; survivor's guilt; advocating for gay marriage; its relatively quick acceptance; and Tom's husband of 36 years who's had HIV for more than three decades.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, trans activist Shannon Minter debating trans issues, Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Ross Barkan is a 35 year-old American journalist and novelist from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His third novel, Glass Century, was published on 6 May 2025.On a semi-vacation to London this summer, Ross and Jack met to speak about Ross's favourite Martin Amis novel, Inside Story.This the first episode of the series to deal explicitly, and at length, with Donald Trump.Looking beyond the playful concept of 'The Maggot Probability' (first coined by Kingsley Amis to explain the degenerative effects of an ageing brain), Ross and Jack discuss Amis's graver concerns about true impact of America's septuagenarian president on its politics and political culture.As a New Yorker, Ross recognises what he calls Trump's "outer-borough mindset", an attitude of adversity towards the elites of Manhattan who famously paid Trump little serious attention before his meteoric rise to office in 2016 forced them to.That mindset, he argues, became Trump's calling card to the left behind of America, for whom Washington had come to represent the same den of iniquity and aloofness that the gleaming towers of The Big Apple had to Trump in the 70s and 80s.And yet, while Amis does not take Trump lightly, Ross says his criticisms of Trump lack the corrosive power of the pen that Amis was otherwise known for. Amis confesses to taking an arch tone on the subject in Inside Story, though says he does so only because Trump is a "sick joke".It's suggested later in the conversation that while Amis excelled at diagnosing modern pathologies in characters like John Self, he may have bottled it when it came to confronting the real thing in Trump. Does it take a true New Yorker to satirise this century's most controversial Western leader? It may help to read Ross's new novel before answering.Finally, listen to this episode to discover what Ross took as indispensable writing advice from Amis in Inside Story.FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamisFIND US ON YOUTUBE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Links to assorted local theater & book venues   Colm Toibin: “Long Island,” sequel to “Brooklyn” Colm Tóibín discusses his latest novel, “Long Island,” which follows characters from his earlier best-seller, “Brooklyn” twenty years later. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955. He is the author of 11 novels including The Master, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, House of Names and The Magician. His work has been shortlisted for The Booker Prize three times, has won the Costa Novel Award and the IMPAC Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. Special thanks to the folks at BookShop West Portal in San Francisco for their assistance. Complete Interview.   Martin Amis: “The Zone of Interest” Martin Amis (1949-2023), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studio on a book tour for “The Zone of Interest,” October 29, 2014 Novelist and essayist Martin Amis died of cancer on May 19, 2023 at the age of 73, leaving behind such novels as The Rachel Papers, London Fields, The Information, and his last memoir-cum-novel, Inside Story. On October 29th, 2014, Richard Wolinsky conducted the last of five interviews with Martin Amis, about Amis's then most recent novel, The Zone of Interest. A new film adaptation of that novel recently opened to rave reviews. Complete Interview   Review of “& Juliet” at BroadwaySF Orpheum through July 27, 2025.   Book Interview/Events and Theatre Links Note: Shows may unexpectedly close early or be postponed due to actors' positive COVID tests. Check the venue for closures, ticket refunds, and mask requirements before arrival. Dates are in-theater performances unless otherwise noted. Some venues operate Tuesday – Sunday; others for shorter periods each week. All times Pacific Time. Closing dates are sometimes extended. Book Stores Bay Area Book Festival  See website for highlights from the 110th Annual Bay Area Book Festival, May 31 – June 1, 2025. Book Passage.  Monthly Calendar. Mix of on-line and in-store events. Books Inc.  Mix of on-line and in-store events. The Booksmith.  Monthly Event Calendar. BookShop West Portal. Monthly Event Calendar. Center for Literary Arts, San Jose. See website for Book Club guests in upcoming months. Green Apple Books. Events calendar. Kepler's Books  On-line Refresh the Page program listings. Live Theater Companies Actors Ensemble of Berkeley.  Summers at John Hinkel Park: Cymbeline opens July 4; The Taming of the Shrew opens August 16. See website for readings and events. Actor's Reading Collective (ARC).  All readings at 7 pm: The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath, July 13 Aurora; Appropriate by Brandon Jacob Jenkins, July 20 Aurora, July 21  Z Below. The Best We Could by Emily Feldman, July 27 Aurora, July 28 Z Below; Recipe by Michael Gene Sullivan, August 4 Aurora; August 5 The Magic. African American Art & Culture Complex. See website for calendar. Afro-Solo Theatre Company.See website for calendar. American Conservatory Theatre Young Conservatory: Hadestown, Teen Edition, August 8-17, Strand. Kim's Convenience by Ins Choi, Sept 18 – Oct 19, Toni Rembe Theatre. Aurora Theatre  The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner, with Marga Gomez, July 12 – August 10.  Awesome Theatre Company. See website for information. Berkeley Rep. The Reservoir .by Jake Brasch, Sept. 5 – Oct 12, Peets Theatre. See website for summer events. Berkeley Shakespeare Company See website for upcoming events and productions. Boxcar Theatre. The Illusionist with Kevin Blake, live at the Palace Theatre. Tony Brava Theatre Center: See calendar for events listings. The Heat Will Kill Everything written and performed by Keith Josef Adkins, July 17-19. BroadwaySF: & Juliet, July 1-27, Orpheum. See website for complete listings for the Orpheum, Golden Gate and Curran Theaters. Broadway San Jose:  Moulin Rouge!, The Musical. July 8-13. See website for other events. Center Rep: Indecent by Paula Vogel, September 1 – 28. Lesher Center. Central Stage. See website for upcoming productions, 5221 Central Avenue, Richmond Central Works  The Last Goat by Gary Graves, June 28 – July 27. Cinnabar Theatre. Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood by Ken Ludwig, September  12-28, Sonoma State. Club Fugazi. Dear San Francisco ongoing. Check website for Music Mondays listings. Contra Costa Civic Theatre Pippin, August 30 – Sept. 14. See website for other events. Golden Thread   The Return by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast, August 7 – 24, The Garret at ACT's Toni Rembe Theatre. Hillbarn Theatre: Murder for Two, a musical comedy, October 9 – November 2, 2025. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. See website for specific workshops and events. Los Altos Stage Company. Guys & Dolls, July 18 – 27, Los Altos Youth Theatre. Lower Bottom Playaz  August Wilson's Two Trains Running, August 8 -31. August Wilson's King Hedley II, November 8 -30. BAM House, Oakland. Magic Theatre. Aztlan by Luis Alfaro, World Premiere, June 25 – July 20 (extended). See website for additional events. Marin Shakespeare Company: A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, June 13 – July 13, Forest Meadows Amphitheatre. See website for other events. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Upcoming Events Page. New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC)  Ride the Cyclone, the musical, July 11 – August 15. New Performance Traditions.  See website for upcoming schedule Oakland Theater Project. Les Blancs (The Whites) by Lorraine Hansberry, July 11 – 27. Odd Salon: Upcoming events in San Francisco & New York, and streaming. Palace of Fine Arts Theater.  See website for event listings. Pear Theater. Constellations by Nick Payne, June 27 – July 20. See website for staged readings and other events. Playful People Productions. See web page for information on upcoming shows. Presidio Theatre. See website for complete schedule of events and performances. Ray of Light: 9 to 5, the Musical. September 2025. Ross Valley Players: See website for New Works Sunday night readings and other events. San Francisco Playhouse. My Fair Lady, July 3 – Sept. 13. SFBATCO.  See website for upcoming streaming and in- theater shows.  The Day The Sky Turned Orange by Julius Ernesto, Sept 5 – Oct. 5, Z Space. San Jose Stage Company: See website for events and upcoming season Shotgun Players.  The Magnolia Ballet by Terry Guest, July 12 – August 10. South Bay Musical Theatre:  The Sound of Music, September 27 – October 18. Stagebridge: See website for events and productions. Storytime every 4th Saturday. The Breath Project. Streaming archive. The Marsh: Calendar listings for Berkeley, San Francisco and Marshstream. Theatre Lunatico See website for upcoming events and producctions. Theatre Rhino  Kyles' by Olivia Bratco, July 3-18.Streaming: Essential Services Project, conceived and performed by John Fisher, all weekly performances now available on demand. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean  Jimmy Dean, A New Musical, June  18 – July 13. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Word for Word.  See website for upcoming productions. Misc. Listings: BAMPFA: On View calendar for Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Berkeley Symphony: See website for listings. Chamber Music San Francisco: Calendar, 2025 Season. Dance Mission Theatre. On stage events calendar. Fort Mason Center. Events calendar. Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Calendar listings and upcoming shows. San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. See schedule for upcoming SFGMC performances. San Francisco Opera. Calendar listings. San Francisco Symphony. Calendar listings. Filmed Live Musicals: Searchable database of all filmed live musicals, podcast, blog. If you'd like to add your bookstore or theater venue to this list, please write Richard@kpfa.org                                   .   . The post July 10, 2025: Colm Toibin – Martin Amis appeared first on KPFA.

"The writer has to have patience, the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out. And if that's not worth doing," Leonard said, "then he doesn't want to write." Leonard wanted to write from a young age, and write he did, first producing western stories and western novels before moving toward the crime novels that made his reputation. His is the career of a working writer the likes we don't see much of anymore. About COOLER THAN COOL, Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Barry writes that "If you love Elmore Leonard-and who doesn't?-you'll love this fascinating, richly detailed account of how one of our greatest storytellers lived his life and learned his craft."Over the course of his sixty-year career, Elmore Leonard published forty-five novels that had enduring appeal to readers around the world. Revered by other writers such as Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, and Stephen King, his books were innovative in their blending of a Hemingway-inspired noirish minimalism and masterful use of dialogue over exposition-a direct evolution spurred by his years as a screenwriter.When C. M. Kushins was fifteen he worked up his courage and wrote a fan letter to Elmore and included one of his own short stories. Elmore proofread it and wrote an encouraging letter back. Years later, Kushins finally got a short story published and Elmore sent him a congratulatory note. When he first started thinking about writing this book, Kushins went nosing around the University of South Carolina archives-and found his own letters going back to when he was fifteen. Elmore had saved all their correspondence. It was this story that helped him get the Leonard family on board with the book. Indeed, the Leonard family has fully participated, contributing original interviews, additional personal correspondence, exclusive photographs, as well as access to Leonard's unfinished final novel. The biography also includes unpublished, loose memoir excerpts. These are included here for the first time to illuminate key passages of importance throughout Leonard's life in his own words.Leonard's fiction contained many layers, and at the heart of his work were progressive themes, stemming from his years as a student of the Jesuit religious order, his personal beliefs in social justice, and his successful battle over alcoholism. He drew inspiration from greats like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the true motivation and brilliance behind his crime writing was the ongoing class struggle to achieve the American Dream-often seen through the eyes of law enforcement officers and the criminals they vowed to apprehend.COOLER THAN COOL is not just a biography for fans of Leonard's fiction. His is work was also the source material for many movies including 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Out of Sight-as well as the TV series Justified-and influenced American filmmaking, especially the western and crime genres.Definitive and revealing, COOLER THAN COOL shows Leonard emerging as one of the last writers of the "pulp fiction" era of midcentury America, to ultimately become one of the most successful storytellers of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to have far-reaching effects on both contemporary crime fiction and American filmmaking.One more thing: 2025 also marks Elmore Leonard's centennial. In September, Mariner Books will bring a never-published novella by the author, Picket Line, with an introduction by Kushins, timed to Leonard's October birthday.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Links to assorted local theater & book venues   William Finn (1951-2025) and James Lapine William Finn, Richard Wolinsky and James Lapine Composer/lyricist William Finn, who died on April 7th, 2025 at the age of 73 and director/librettist James Lapine, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded March 20, 2019 at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. William Finn is best known for writing the music and lyrics for two Broadway shows, Falsettos, which was the first gay-themed Broadway musical, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which has become a staple of community theatre companies around the world. He also wrote A New Brain, which dealt with his near death experience following brain surgery.  Falsettos was originally three one-act musicals which opened off-Broadway, In Trousers, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland and the latter two became Falsettos, which opened on Broadway in 1992, co-authored and directed by James Lapine, who'd also co-authored Falsettoland. James Lapine is best known for his work with Stephen Sondheim on Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. Falsettos was revived on Broadway in 2016 and came to San Francisco in spring of 2019. Richard Wolinsnky had a chance to sit down with both William Finn and James Lapine on March 20, 2019 in the lobby of the Golden Gate Theatre to discuss Falsettos, as well as take a brief look at each man's career.   Martin Amis (1949-2023): The Zone of Interest Martin Amis (1949-2023), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studio on a book tour for “The Zone of Interest,” October 29, 2014. The Zone of Interest focuses on the lives of people who ran the concentration camps, as they chose to avoid thinking about their crimes against humanity. A film adaptation received Oscar nominations a couple of years ago. Novelist and essayist Martin Amis died of cancer on May 19, 2023 at the age of 73, leaving behind such novels as The Rachel Papers, London Fields, The Information, and his last memoir-cum-novel, Inside Story. On October 29th, 2014, Richard Wolinsky conducted the last of five interviews with Martin Amis, about Amis's then most recent novel, The Zone of Interest.   Review of “Here There Are Blueberries” at Berkeley Rep Roda Theatre through May 11, 2025.   Book Interview/Events and Theatre Links Note: Shows may unexpectedly close early or be postponed due to actors' positive COVID tests. Check the venue for closures, ticket refunds, and vaccination and mask requirements before arrival. Dates are in-theater performances unless otherwise noted. Some venues operate Tuesday – Sunday; others Wednesday or Thursday through Sunday. All times Pacific Time. Closing dates are sometimes extended. Book Stores Bay Area Book Festival  See website for highlights from the 10th Annual Bay Area Book Festival, June 1-2, 2024. Book Passage.  Monthly Calendar. Mix of on-line and in-store events. Books Inc.  Mix of on-line and in-store events. The Booksmith.  Monthly Event Calendar. BookShop West Portal. Monthly Event Calendar. Center for Literary Arts, San Jose. See website for Book Club guests in upcoming months. Green Apple Books. Events calendar. Kepler's Books  On-line Refresh the Page program listings. Live Theater Companies Actors Ensemble of Berkeley.  Summers at John Hinkel Park: Cymbeline opens July 4; The Taming of the Shrew opens August 16. See website for readings and events. Actor's Reading Collective (ARC).   See website for upcoming productions. African American Art & Culture Complex. See website for calendar. Afro-Solo Theatre Company.See website for calendar. American Conservatory Theatre Eddie Izzard Hamlet, April 1-20 Strand. Two Trains Running by August Wilson, April 15 -May 4, and The Comedy of Errors, April 22 – May 3 with The Acting Company, in repertory, Toni Rembe Theater. Aurora Theatre  Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage, April 26-May 25, 2025 Awesome Theatre Company. See website for information. Berkeley Rep. Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, April 5 – May 11, Roda Theatre. Berkeley Shakespeare Company Julius Caesar, June 13-21, Live Oak Theater, Berkeley. y. See website for upcoming events and productions. Boxcar Theatre. The Illusionist with Kevin Blake, live at the Palace Theatre, through April 27. Brava Theatre Center: See calendar for current and upcoming productions. BroadwaySF: Six, April 8-20, Curran; Mamma Mia! April 30 – May 11, Orpheum. See website for complete listings for the Orpheum, Golden Gate and Curran Theaters. Broadway San Jose:  Six. April 22-27. See website for other events. Center Rep: The Roommate by Jen Silverman, March 30 – April 20. Lesher Center. Central Stage. See website for upcoming productions, 5221 Central Avenue, Richmond Central Works  The Last Goat by Gary Graves, June 28 – July 27. Cinnabar Theatre. Bright Star, June 13-29, Sonoma State. Club Fugazi. Dear San Francisco ongoing. Check website for Music Mondays listings. Contra Costa Civic Theatre Fiddler on the Roof June 7 – 22. See website for other events. 42nd Street Moon. See website for upcoming productions. Golden Thread  AZAD (The Rabbit and the Wolf) by Sona Tatoyan in collaboration with Jared Mezzocchi, April 11 – May 3. See website for other events. Hillbarn Theatre: Writing Fragments Home by Jeffrey Lo, April 17 – May 4. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Come Thru: A Celebration of Black Artistry, Story Telling and Community, May 5-18, Magic Theatre, Fort Mason. See website for specific workshops and events. Los Altos Stage Company. Cyrano by Edmund Rostand, April 10 – May 4. Lower Bottom Playaz  See website for upcoming productions. Magic Theatre. the boiling by Sunui Chang  April 3 -20, 2025. See website for additional events. Marin Shakespeare Company: See website for calendar. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Upcoming Events Page. New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) Simple Mexican Pleasures by Eric Reyes Loo, April 18 – May 11. New Performance Traditions.  See website for upcoming schedule Oakland Theater Project.  I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, March 21 – April 13, Odd Salon: Upcoming events in San Francisco & New York, and streaming. Palace of Fine Arts Theater.  See website for event listings. Pear Theater. Henry V by William Shakespeare, April 18 – May 11. See website for staged readings and other events. Playful People Productions. Disney's Frozen Jr., May 16-25, Hoover Theater, San Jose. Presidio Theatre. See website for complete schedule of events and performances. Ray of Light: Next to Normal. May 30 – June 21. Ross Valley Players: The Book of Will  by Lauren Gunderson, May 9 – June 8. See website for New Works Sunday night readings and other events. San Francisco Playhouse. Fat Ham by James Ijames, March 20 – April 19. SFBATCO.  See website for upcoming streaming and in- theater shows.  The Day The Sky Turned Orange by Julius Ernesto, Sept 5 – Oct. 5, Z Space. San Jose Stage Company: The Underpants by Steve Martin, April 3 -27. Shotgun Players.  Yellowface by David Henry Hwang, May 10 – June 8. South Bay Musical Theatre:  Brigadoon, May 17-June 7, Stagebridge: See website for events and productions. Storytime every 4th Saturday. The Breath Project. Streaming archive. The Marsh: Calendar listings for Berkeley, San Francisco and Marshstream. Theatre Lunatico  Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, April 26 – May 18. LaVal's Subterranean Theatre. Theatre Rhino  Gumiho by Nina Ki, April 17 – May 11. Streaming: Essential Services Project, conceived and performed by John Fisher, all weekly performances now available on demand. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. The Heart-Sellers by Lloyd Suh, April 2-27. Word for Word.  See website for upcoming productions. Misc. Listings: BAM/PFA: On View calendar for Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Berkeley Symphony: See website for listings. Chamber Music San Francisco: Calendar, 2025 Season. Dance Mission Theatre. On stage events calendar. Fort Mason Center. Events calendar. Crushing, live monologue show, Feb. 27-28. Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Calendar listings and upcoming shows. San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. See schedule for upcoming SFGMC performances. San Francisco Opera. Calendar listings. San Francisco Symphony. Calendar listings. Filmed Live Musicals: Searchable database of all filmed live musicals, podcast, blog. If you'd like to add your bookstore or theater venue to this list, please write Richard@kpfa.org                                   .   . The post April 17, 2025: William Finn & James Lapine: Masters of the Musical appeared first on KPFA.

On Sunday 23 March 2025, listeners of the podcast gathered in Central London to watch a live Amisathon, featuring 8 panellists and the show's host.The panel included former guests as well as a couple of new faces: Leo Robson, Alys Denby, Finn McRedmond, James Marriott, Zoe Strimpel, Sam Leith, Vincenzo Barney and John Niven.It was a great success. Thank you to the 90+ ticket-holders who attended, to our wonderful panel, and to the stage team at 21Soho.Relive the event or listen for the first time in this episode, ripped straight from the boards of the stage at the venue.FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamis Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over 50 years, she has become one of the most revered writers in Australia. Is she finally going to get worldwide recognition? By Sophie Elmhirst. Read by Nicolette Chin. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Welcome to the 92nd Episode of the ABC Pod the Adult Book Club where we drink and we read things. This episodefeatures Night Train by Martin Amis. Discussion of the book starts at the 11th minute. Spoilers are between the 41 and 1:01 minute marks. We go in depth about how learning this book was meant as a parody after the fact, changed how we viewed it. In spoilers, and before, we go off the rails quite a few times with tangents and trying to remember different actor's names, but always steer it back to the book. We finish with our usual segments and a surprise read for next episode. Enjoy! 

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Links to assorted local theater & book venues   Anthony Lewis on the First Amendment Anthony Lewis (1927-2013) discussing “Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment,” with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded February 4, 2008 in the KPFA studios. In his long career, Anthony Lewis spent time as the Washington Bureau chief of the New York Times, was the author of “Gideon's Trumpet,” about a Supreme Court case that led to free legal counsel for indigent defendants, and spent several years as an op-ed writer for the Times. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for reportage, and wrote five books alone and two books with a co-author. In this segment from a longer interview, he delves into the history of the First Amendment, and freedom of speech in the United States.   Martin Amis (1949-2021) Martin Amis (1949-2023), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studio on a book tour for “Lionel Asbo, State of England,” September 20, 2012. Novelist and essayist Martin Amis died of cancer on May 19, 2023 at the age of 73, leaving behind such novels as The Rachel Papers, London Fields, The Information, and his last memoir-cum-novel, Inside Story. On September 20, 2012, Richard Wolinsky conducted the fourth of five interviews with Martin Amis, discussing this satire about the nature of celebrity and celebrity culture. Complete Interview.     Review of “Art” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage through April 12, 2025. Review of “Nobody Loves You” at ACT Toni Rembe Theatre through March 30, 2025.   Book Interview/Events and Theatre Links Note: Shows may unexpectedly close early or be postponed due to actors' positive COVID tests. Check the venue for closures, ticket refunds, and vaccination and mask requirements before arrival. Dates are in-theater performances unless otherwise noted. Some venues operate Tuesday – Sunday; others Wednesday or Thursday through Sunday. All times Pacific Time. Closing dates are sometimes extended. Book Stores Bay Area Book Festival  See website for highlights from the 10th Annual Bay Area Book Festival, June 1-2, 2024. Book Passage.  Monthly Calendar. Mix of on-line and in-store events. Books Inc.  Mix of on-line and in-store events. The Booksmith.  Monthly Event Calendar. BookShop West Portal. Monthly Event Calendar. Center for Literary Arts, San Jose. See website for Book Club guests in upcoming months. Green Apple Books. Events calendar. Kepler's Books  On-line Refresh the Page program listings. Live Theater Companies Actors Ensemble of Berkeley.  Summers at John Hinkel Park: Cymbeline opens July 4; The Taming of the Shrew opens August 16. See website for readings and events. Actor's Reading Collective (ARC).   See website for upcoming productions. African American Art & Culture Complex. See website for calendar. Afro-Solo Theatre Company. Arts Festival 31: Let Freedom Ring, March 28-30, Potrero Stage. American Conservatory Theatre Nobody Loves You, a musical, Feb. 28 – March 30, Toni Rembe Theatre. Aurora Theatre  Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage, April 26-May 25, 2025 Awesome Theatre Company. See website for information. Berkeley Rep. Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Conor McPherson, February 14 – March 23, Peets Theatre. Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, April 5 – May 11, Roda Theatre. Berkeley Shakespeare Company. See website for upcoming shows. Supergalza: A Shakespeare Cabaret, spring 2025. Boxcar Theatre. The Illusionist with Kevin Blake, live at the Palace Theatre, through April 27. Brava Theatre Center: See calendar for current and upcoming productions. BroadwaySF: Six, April 8-20, Curran; Mamma Mia! April 30 – May 11, Orpheum. See website for complete listings for the Orpheum, Golden Gate and Curran Theaters. Broadway San Jose:  The Cher Show. March 18 – 23. Center Rep: The Roommate by Jen Silverman, March 30 – April 20. Lesher Center. Central Stage. See website for upcoming productions, 5221 Central Avenue, Richmond Central Works  Push/Pull by Harry Davis, March 1 – 30, 2025. Cinnabar Theatre. Young Rep: Hamlet, March 15-23, Petaluma SRJC; Bright Star, June 13-29, Sonoma State. Club Fugazi. Dear San Francisco ongoing. Check website for Music Mondays listings. Contra Costa Civic Theatre Fiddler on the Roof June 7 – 22. See website for other events. 42nd Street Moon. See website for upcoming productions. Golden Thread  AZAD (The Rabbit and the Wolf) by Sona Tatoyan in collaboration with Jared Mezzocchi, April 11 – May 3. See website for other events. Hillbarn Theatre: Fly by Night conceived by Kim Rosenstock Written by Will Connolly, Michael Mitnick, and Kim Rosenstock, March 6 – 23. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. See website for upcoming productions. Los Altos Stage Company. Cyrano by Edmund Rostand, April 10 – May 4. Lower Bottom Playaz  See website for upcoming productions. Magic Theatre. the boiling by Sunui Chang  April 3 -20, 2025. See website for additional events. Marin Shakespeare Company: See website for calendar. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Upcoming Events Page. New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) Wild with Happy by Colman Domingo, March 7 – April 6. New Performance Traditions.  See website for upcoming schedule Oakland Theater Project.  I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, March 21 – April 6, Odd Salon: Upcoming events in San Francisco & New York, and streaming. Palace of Fine Arts Theater.  See website for event listings. Pear Theater. Penelope, a one-woman show written and performed by Ellen McLaughlin, March 27-30. Henry V by William Shakespeare, April 18 – May 11. See website for staged readings and other events. Playful People Productions. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, April 10-19. Presidio Theatre. See website for complete schedule of events and performances. Ray of Light: Next to Normal. May 30 – June 21. Ross Valley Players: Pet Lingerie, a new musical, March 21- April 6. See website for New Works Sunday night readings and other events. San Francisco Playhouse. Fat Ham by James Ijames, March 20 – April 19. SFBATCO.  See website for upcoming streaming and in- theater shows. San Jose Stage Company: The Underpants by Steve Martin, April 3 -27. Shotgun Players.  Art by Yazmina Reza, through April 12. Staged Reading: How to Defend Yourself by Liliana Padilla, March 31, April 1, 7 pm. South Bay Musical Theatre: Titanic, a concert presentation, April 12-13. Brigadoon, May 17-June 7, Stagebridge: See website for events and productions. Storytime every 4th Saturday. The Breath Project. Streaming archive. The Marsh: Calendar listings for Berkeley, San Francisco and Marshstream. Theatre Lunatico  Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, April 26 – May 18. LaVal's Subterranean Theatre. Theatre Rhino  Gumiho by Nina Ki, April 17 – May 11.Streaming: Essential Services Project, conceived and performed by John Fisher, all weekly performances now available on demand. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Happy Pleasant Valley, Book, Music, and Lyrics by Min Kahng, Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto, March 5-30. The Heart-Sellers by Lloyd Suh, April 2-27. Word for Word.  See website for upcoming productions. Misc. Listings: BAM/PFA: On View calendar for Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Berkeley Symphony: See website for listings. Chamber Music San Francisco: Calendar, 2025 Season. Dance Mission Theatre. On stage events calendar. Fort Mason Center. Events calendar. Crushing, live monologue show, Feb. 27-28. Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Calendar listings and upcoming shows. San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Signs of Life? written and performed by Cheyenne Jackson, 2 performances February 14, Chan National Queer Arts Center. See schedule for upcoming SFGMC performances. San Francisco Opera. Calendar listings. San Francisco Symphony. Calendar listings. Filmed Live Musicals: Searchable database of all filmed live musicals, podcast, blog. If you'd like to add your bookstore or theater venue to this list, please write Richard@kpfa.org                                   .   . The post March 20, 2025: Anthony Lewis – Martin Amis appeared first on KPFA.

Martin Amis (1949-2023), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studio on a book tour for “Lionel Asbo, State of England,” September 20, 2012. Novelist and essayist Martin Amis died of cancer on May 19, 2023 at the age of 73, leaving behind such novels as The Rachel Papers, London Fields, The Information, and his last memoir-cum-novel, Inside Story. On September 20, 2012, Richard Wolinsky conducted the fourth of five interviews with Martin Amis, discussing this satire about the nature of celebrity and celebrity culture. The post Martin Amis (1949-2023) IV, “Lionel Asbo, State of England,” 2012 appeared first on KPFA.

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, no amount of star power can save a “screamingly stupid show.” (Sorry, Robert De Niro et al.)  With Sam Adams—Slate Senior Editor and Staff Writer—sitting in for Dana, the team talks about the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day. Then they remember the career of Gene Hackman and end with their thoughts about this Atlantic article on navigating optimism during times of crisis. Endorsements: Julia: Moist Peanut Butter Cake Recipe from Cakes By MK Steve: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat' by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian Sam: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Again! After Julia endorsed it last week.) Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

'It was not easy to find a poet in the United States in my reading,who wrote with the clarity and intelligence that Larkin possessed. I found him to be full of surprises..'My guest today is writer David Biespiel who was born in Texas and who is now Poet in residence at Oregan state university. He has written for numerous publications and reviewed poetry for the Washington Post and the New York Times. He has taught creative writing at university across the US., has won many awards and published several books of his own poetry. In preparation for talking to David, he recommended that I have a look at his book A Long High Whistle: Selected Columns on Poetry, published in 2015, which is a collection of his pithy and fascinating articles on poets and poetry.‘I love that they are slender, I love that they are pocket sized, the whole texture of them- the Faber books.'Larkin poems mentioned:Church Going, This Be The Verse, I Remember, I Remember, Dockery and Son, Talking In Bed, Sad Steps, Friday Night In the Royal Station Hotel, Broadcast, An Arundel Tomb, The MowerPoets:John Ashberry, Walt Whitman, TS Eliot, Thom Gunn, Keats, Chaucer, Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Herbert, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, William Stafford, Henry Allenhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/06/03/philip-larkins-everyday-poetry/1a53b1df-d319-43fc-9249-af52238ced60/The Paris Review, Archie Burnett, Martin Amis and Anthony Thwaite collections, US/UK poetry, railway journeys, rhyme schemes, literary tours of UK/Italyhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Long-High-Whistle-David-Biespiel/dp/1938308107“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1950)For more about Larkin's Coventry, please watch: Philip Pullen's fantastic 2022 talk at the PLS AGM in Coventry at Larkin's school King Henry VII School.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDOqZ4N_fUk&t=3106s

Dotun and Tim are joined by Paul Sarahs to discuss football and everything in between. Is darts a real sport? Author, Martin Amis had his doubts...

English novelist Anthony Quinn has met and interviewed Martin Amis on several occasions. Their first encounter followed the publication of London Fields in 1989, the second during the publicity storm that came with Amis's 1995 novel The Information.In this episode, he and Jack discuss Amis's last novel, Inside Story, published in 2020. Although Anthony struggled with it in his first reading, he later came to consider it a masterful valedictory that encompasses all the best and worst of Amis as a man, and as a writer. Described by some as 'The Big Book of Mart', Inside Story is part memoir, part novel, and part writing manual. As well as revising Amis's final words of wisdom and warning to writers, Anthony and Jack cover the great romantic and literary loves of Amis's life, from Saul Bellow and his godfather Phillip Larkin, to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. Crucially, Anthony reveals who he believes Amis loved most of all the people in his life. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamis

In this episode, We explore the fascinating world of J.G. Ballard's provocative works, what might later be known as Climate Fiction, written mostly last century. From his early novel "The Drowned World" to the controversial "Crash," we delve into how Ballard's dystopian visions have shaped the genre. We feature insights from a PBS show Hot Mess, a short BBC film Ballard appeared in 1973 exploring his experimental novel of linked short stories called “The Atrocity Exhibition,” and a 2006 South Bank Show interview. We discuss the psychological and societal impacts of Climate Fiction, and how it might inspire change in an era of environmental urgency. First we begin with a 2019 clip from Hot Mess from PBS, featuring Lindsay Ellis, of It's Lit, and Amy Brady, the editor-in-chief of The Chicago Review of Books. Hot Mess | The Rise of Climate Fiction feat. Lindsay Ellis & Amy Brady | Episode 35 | PBS https://www.pbs.org/video/the-rise-of-climate-fiction-feat-lindsay-ellis-amy-brady-2s2sxh/ The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard's instruction manual on how to disrupt mass media and recontextualize technology in a dystopian landscape overrun with industrial waste and technological white noise. The excerpt is from a 1973 BBC film directed by Harely Cokliss and features Ballard talking about car crash fetishism and the response to the bleak modern landscapes dominated by industrial monotony and the irrational violence of the technology-infused world which would coalesce into his controversial novel Crash, published in 1973. https://youtu.be/QRxpZ142lkI?si=gh5FjzV9BrUvs-r0 The next clip is a 2006 interview of JG Ballard by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, which also features prominent British authors Will Self, Iain Sinclair, and Martin Amis. https://youtu.be/le0tW1y609w?si=2DeFYxI-wqGe-Cu8 For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio Resources/Articles: https://wilderutopia.com/performance/literary/j-g-ballard-atrocity-exhibition-modernist-motorcar-dystopia/ James Graham Ballard who lived between 1930 and 2009 was an English novelist and short-story writer known for psychologically provocative works that explore relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. Ballard's original climate fiction work from 1962 was the post-apocalyptic New Wave science fiction novel The Drowned World. He followed with the controversial 1970 short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition, which includes the 1968 story "Why I Want to F- Ronald Reagan", and later the 1973 novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists. In 1984, Ballard won broad critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai;[4] three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs.

VOICES IN THE EVENING by Natalia Ginzburg (trans. DM Low), chosen by Tessa Hadley THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis (trans. Jessica Moore), chosen by Sebastian Faulks EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal, chosen by Harriett GilbertTwo authors pick books they love with Harriett Gilbert.Tessa Hadley (Late In The Day, Free Love, After The Funeral) takes us to post-war Italy with Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg. The drama, suffering and fascism are in the past, but traumas surface in the day-to-day, with first loves and lost chances.Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong, Human Traces, The Seventh Son) chooses The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis, after watching the hit film by Jonathan Glazer and wanting to read the book it was inspired by. The haunting novel follows a Nazi officer who has become enamoured with the Auschwitz camp commandant's wife, and goes inside the minds of the commandant, who lives with his family right next to the concentration camp.Harriett Gilbert brings Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, a gripping novella set on the Trans-Siberian Railway, with a chance encounter between a desperate Russian conscript and a French woman.Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio Bristol Join the conversation on Instagram @bbcagoodread

VOICES IN THE EVENING by Natalia Ginzburg (trans. DM Low), chosen by Tessa Hadley THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis (trans. Jessica Moore), chosen by Sebastian Faulks EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal, chosen by Harriett GilbertTwo authors pick books they love with Harriett Gilbert.Tessa Hadley (Late In The Day, Free Love, After The Funeral) takes us to post-war Italy with Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg. The drama, suffering and fascism are in the past, but traumas surface in the day-to-day, with first loves and lost chances.Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong, Human Traces, The Seventh Son) chooses The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis, after watching the hit film by Jonathan Glazer and wanting to read the book it was inspired by. The haunting novel follows a Nazi officer who has become enamoured with the Auschwitz camp commandant's wife, and goes inside the minds of the commandant, who lives with his family right next to the concentration camp.Harriett Gilbert brings Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, a gripping novella set on the Trans-Siberian Railway, with a chance encounter between a desperate Russian conscript and a French woman.Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio Bristol Join the conversation on Instagram @bbcagoodread

The Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest is one of the most acclaimed and talked about films of 2024. Directed by Jonathan Glazer and loosely based on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest focuses on the life of Rudolf Höss and his family during the Second World War, when he was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In today's episode, Professor Richard J Evans, one of the world's leading experts on Nazi Germany, speaks to Rob Attar about the real story of Rudolf Höss. He also offers his thoughts on the film and recounts his experience of working with Martin Amis on the original book. The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moore is the subject of a new HBO (MAX) documentary that explores her rise in Hollywood — from her 1970s hit The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which inspired a generation of single professional women, to her 1960s breakout role on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She spoke with Terry Gross in 1995. Also, we remember novelist, essayist and literary critic Martin Amis, who died last week at 73. Film critic Justin Chang reviews the new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.